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THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CONNECTICUT
BY
M. LOUISE GREENE, PhD.
PREFACE
The following monograph is the outgrowth of three earlier and shorter essays. The first, "Church and State in Connecticut to 1818," was presented to Yale University as a doctor's thesis. The second, a briefer and more popularly written article, won the Straus prize offered in 1896 through Brown University by the Hon. Oscar S. Straus. The third, a paper containing additional matter, was so far approved by the American Historical Association as to receive honorable mention in the Justin Winsor prize competition of 1901.
With such encouragement, it seemed as if the history of the development of religious liberty in Connecticut might serve a larger purpose than that of satisfying personal interest alone. In Connecticut such development was not marked, as so often elsewhere, by wild disorder, outrageous oppression, tyranny of classes, civil war, or by any great retrograde movement. Connecticut was more modern in her progress towards such liberty, and her contribution to advancing civilization was a pattern of stability, of reasonableness in government, and of a slow broadening out of the conception of liberty, as she gradually softened down her restrictions upon religious and personal freedom.
And yet, Connecticut is recalled as a part of that New England where those not Congregationalists, the unorthodox or radical thinkers, found early and late an uncomfortable atmosphere and restricted liberties. By a study of her past, I have hoped to contribute to a fairer judgment of the men and measures of colonial times, and to a correct estimate of those essentials in religion and morals which endure from age to age, and which alone, it would seem, must constitute the basis of that "ultimate union of Christendom" toward which so many confidently look. The past should teach the present, and one generation, from dwelling upon the transient beliefs and opinions of a preceding, may better judge what are the non-essentials of its own.
Connecticut's individual experiment in the union of Church and State is separable neither from the New England setting of her earliest days nor from the early years of that Congregationalism which the colony approved and established. Hence, the opening chapters of her story must treat of events both in old England and in New. And because religious liberty was finally won by a coalition of men like-minded in their attitude towards rights of conscience and in their desire for certain necessary changes and reforms in government, the final chapters must deal with social and political conditions more than with those purely religious. It may be pertinent to remark that the passing of a hundred years since the divorce of Church and State and the reforms of a century ago have brought to the commonwealth some of the same deplorable political conditions that the men of the past, the first Constitutional Reform Party, swept away by the peaceful revolution of 1818.
For encouragement, assistance, and suggestions, I am especially indebted to Professor George B. Adams and Professor Williston Walker of Yale University, to Professor Charles M. Andrews of Bryn Mawr, to Dr. William G. Andrews, rector of Christ Church, Guilford, Conn., and to Professor Lucy M. Salmon of Vassar College. Of numerous libraries, my largest debt is to that of Yale University.
M. LOUISE GREENE.
NEW HAVEN, October 20, 1905.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE EVOLUTION OF EARLY CONGREGATIONALISM
Preparation of the English nation for the two earliest forms of Congregationalism, Brownism and Barrowism.—Rise of Separatism and Puritanism.—Non-conformists during Queen Mary's reign.—Revival of the Reformation movement under Queen Elizabeth.—Development of Presbyterianism.—Three Cambridge men, Robert Browne, Henry Greenwood, and Henry Barrowe.—Brownism and Barrowism.—The Puritans under Elizabeth, her early tolerance and later change of policy.—Arrest of the Puritan movement by the clash between Episcopal and Presbyterian forms of polity and the pretensions of the latter.—James the First and his policy of conformity.—Exile of the Gainsborough and Scrooby Separatists.—Separatist writings.—General approachment of Puritans and Separatists in their ideas of church polity.—The Scrooby exiles in America.—Sympathy of the Separatists of Plymouth Colony with both the English Established Church and with English Puritans.
II. THE TRANSPLANTING OF CONGREGATIONALISM
English Puritans decide to colonize in America.—Friendly relations between the settlements of Salem and Plymouth.—Salem decides upon the character of her church organization.—Arrival of Higginson and Skelton with recruits.—Formation of the Salem church and election of officers.—Governor Bradford and delegates from Plymouth present.—The beginning of Congregational polity among the Puritans and the break with English Episcopacy.—Formation and organization of the New England churches.
III. CHURCH AND STATE IN NEW ENGLAND
Church and State in the four New England colonies.—Early theological dissensions and disturbances.—Colonial legislation in behalf of religion.—Development of state authority at the cost of the independence of the church.—Desire of Massachusetts for a platform of church discipline.—Practical working of the theory of Church and State in Connecticut.
IV. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM AND THE HALF-WAY COVENANT
Necessity of a church platform to resist innovations, to answer English criticism, and to meet changing conditions of colonial life.—Summary of the Cambridge Platform.—Of the history of Congregationalism to the year 1648.—Attempt to discipline the Hartford, Conn., church according to the Platform.—Spread of its schism.—Petition to the Connecticut General Court for some method of relief.—The Ministerial Convention or "Synod" of 1657.—Its Half-Way Covenant.—Attitude of the Connecticut churches towards the measure.—Pitkin's petition to the General Court of Connecticut for broader church privileges.—The Court's favorable reply.—Renewed outbreak of schism in the Hartford and other churches.—Failure in the calling of a synod of New England churches.—The Connecticut Court establishes the Congregational Church.—Connecticut's first toleration act.—Settlement of the Hartford dispute.—The new order and its important modifications of ecclesiastical polity.
V. A PERIOD OF TRANSITION
Drift from religious to secular, and from intercolonial to individual interests.—Reforming Synod of 1680.—Religious life in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.—The "Proposals of 1705" in Massachusetts.—Introduction in Connecticut of the Saybrook System of Consociated Church government.
VI. THE SAYBROOK PLATFORM
The Confession of Faith.—Heads of Agreement.—Fifteen Articles.—Attitude of the churches towards the Platform.—Formation of Consociations.—The "Proviso" in the act of establishment.—Neglect to read the proviso to the Norwich church.—Contention arising.—The Norwich church as an example of the difficulty of collecting church rates.
VII. THE SAYBROOK PLATFORM AND THE TOLERATION ACT
Toleration in the "Proviso" of the act establishing the Saybrook Platform.—Reasons for passing the Toleration Act of 1708.—Baptist dissenters.—Rogerine-Baptists, Rogerine-Quakers or Rogerines, and their persecution.—Attitude toward the Society of Friends or Quakers.—Toward the Church of England men or Episcopalians.—Political events parallel in time with the dissenters' attempts to secure exemption from the support of the Connecticut Establishment.—General Ineffectiveness of the Toleration Act.
VIII. THE FIRST VICTORY FOR DISSENT
General dissatisfaction with the Toleration Act.—Episcopalians resent petty persecution.—Their desire for an American episcopate.—Conversion of Cutler, Rector of Yale College, and others.—Bishop Gibson's correspondence with Governor Talcott. —Petition of the Fairfield churchmen.—Law of 1727 exempting Churchmen.—Persecution growing out of neglect to enforce the law.—Futile efforts of the Rogerines to obtain exemption.—Charges against the Colony of Connecticut.—The Winthrop case.—Quakers attempt to secure exemption from ecclesiastical rates.—Exemption granted to Quakers and Baptists.—Relative position of the dissenting and established churches in Connecticut.
IX. "THE GREAT AWAKENING"
Minor revivals in Connecticut before 1740.—Low tone of moral and religious life.—Jonathan Edwards's sermons at Northampton.—Revival of religious interest and its spread among the people.—The Rev. George Whitefield.—The Great Awakening.—Its immediate results.
X. THE GREAT SCHISM
The Separatist churches.—Old Lights and New.—Opposition to the revival movement.—Severe colony laws of 1742-43—Illustrations of oppression of reformed churches, as the North Church of New Haven, the Separatist Church of Canterbury, and that of Enfield.—Persecution of individuals, as of Rev. Samuel Finlay, James Davenport, John Owen, and Benjamin Pomeroy.—Persecution of Moravian missionaries,—The colony law of 1746, "Concerning who shall vote in Society meeting."—Change in public opinion.—Summary of the influence of the Great Awakening and of the great schism.
XI. THE ABROGATION OF THE SAYBROOK PLATFORM
Revision of the laws of 1750.—Attitude of the colonial authorities toward Baptists and Separatists.—Influence on colonial legislation of the English Committee of Dissenters.—Formation of the Church of Yale College.—Separatist and Baptist writers in favor of toleration.—Frothingham's "Articles of Faith and Practice."—Solomon Paine's "Letter."—John Bolles's "To Worship God in Spirit and in Truth."—Israel Holly's "A Word in Zion's Behalf."—Frothingham's "Key to Unlock the Door."—Joseph Brown's "Letter to Infant Baptizers."—The importance of the colonial newspaper.—Influence of English non-conformity upon the religious thought of New England.—The Edwardean School.—Hopkinsinianism and the New Divinity.—The clergy and the people.—Controversy over the renewed proposal for an American episcopate.—Movement for consolidation among all religious bodies.—Influences promoting nationalism and, indirectly, religious toleration.—Connecticut at the threshold of the Revolution.—Connecticut clergymen as advocates of civil liberty.—Greater toleration in religion granted by the laws of 1770.—Development of the idea of democracy in Church and State.—Exemption of Separatists by the revision of the laws in 1784.—Virtual abrogation of the Saybrook Platform.—Status of Dissenters.
XII. CONNECTICUT AT THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTION
Expansion of towns.—Revival of commerce and industries.—Schools and literature.—Newspapers.—Rise of the Anti-Federal party.—Baptist, Methodist, and Separatist dissatisfaction.—Growth of a broader conception of toleration within the Consociated churches.
XIII. CERTIFICATE LAWS AND WESTEKN LAND BILLS
Opposition to the Establishment from dissenters, Anti-Federalists, and the dissatisfied within the Federal ranks.—Certificate law of 1791 to allay dissatisfaction.—Its opposite effect.—A second Certificate law to replace the former.—Antagonism created by legislation in favor of Yale College.—Storm of protest against the Western Land bills of 1792-93.—Congregational missions in Western territory.—Baptist opposition to legislative measures.—The revised Western Land bill as a basis for Connecticut's public school fund.—Result of the opposition roused by the Certificate laws and Western Land bills.
XIV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN CONNECTICUT
Government according to the charter of 1662.—Party tilt over town representation.—Anti-Federal grievances against the Council or Senate, the Judiciary, and other defective parts of the machinery of government.—Constitutional questions.—Rise of the Democratic-Republican party.—Influence of the French Revolution.—The Federal members of the Establishment or "Standing Order," the champions of religious and political stability.—President Dwight, the leader of the Standing Order.—Leaders of the Democratic-Republicans.—Political campaigns of 1804-1806.—Sympathy for the defeated Republicans.—Politics at the close of the War of 1812.
XV. DISESTABLISHMENT
Waning of the power of the Federal party in Connecticut.—Opposition to the Republican administration during the War of 1812.—Participation in the Hartford Convention.—Economic benefits of the war.—Attitude of the New England clergy toward the war.—The Toleration party of 1816.—Act for the Support of Literature and Religion.—Opposition.—Toleration and Reform Ticket of 1817.—New Certificate Law.—Constitution and Reform Ticket of 1818.—Its victory.—The Constitutional Convention.—New Constitution of 1818.—Separation of Church and State.
APPENDIX
NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CONNECTICUT
CHAPTER I
THE EVOLUTION OF EARLY CONGREGATIONALISM
The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.—Psalm cxviii, 22.
The colonists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven were grounded in the system which became known as Congregational, and later as Congregationalism. At the outset they differed not at all in creed, and only in some respects in polity, from the great Puritan body in England, out of which they largely came.[a]
For more than forty years before their migration to New England there had been in old England two clearly developed forms of Congregationalism, Brownism and Barrowism. The term Congregationalism, with its allied forms Congregational and Congregationalist, would not then have been employed. They did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century, and were at first limited in usage to defining or referring to the modified church system of New England. The term "Independent" was preferred to designate the somewhat similar polity among the nonconformist churches in old England. Brownism and Barrowism are both included in Dr. Dexter's comprehensive definition of Congregationalism, using the term "to designate that system of thought, faith, and practice, which starting with the dictum that the conditions of church life are revealed in the Bible, and are thence to be evolved by reverent common-sense, assisted but never controlled by all other sources of knowledge; interprets that book as teaching the reality and independent competency of the local church, and the duty of fraternity and co-working between such churches; from these two truths symmetrically developing its entire system of principles, privileges, and obligations." [1] The "independent competency of the local church" is directly opposed to any system of episcopal government within the church, and is diametrically opposed to any control by king, prince, or civil government. Yet this was one of the pivotal dogmas of Browne and of the later Separatists; this, a fundamental doctrine which Barrowe strove to incorporate into a new church system, but into one having sufficient control over its local units to make it acceptable to a people who were accustomed to the autonomy and stability of a church both episcopal and national in character.
In order to appreciate the changes in church polity and in the religious temper of the people for which Browne and Barrowe labored, one must survey the field in which they worked and note such preparation as it had received before their advent. It is to be recalled that Henry VIII substituted for submission to the Pope submission to himself as head of a church essentially Romish in ritual, teaching, and authority over his subjects. The religious reformation, as such, came later and by slow evolution through the gradual awakening of the moral and spiritual perceptions of the masses. It came very slowly notwithstanding the fact that the first definite and systematic opposition to the abuses and assumptions of the clergy had arisen long before Henry's reign. As early as 1382, the itinerant preachers, sent out by Wyckliff, were complained of by the clergy and magistrates as teachers of insubordinate and dangerous doctrines. Thenceforward, outcroppings of dissatisfaction with the clergy appear from time to time both in English life and literature. This dissatisfaction was silenced by various acts of Parliament which were passed to enforce conformity and to punish heresy. Their character and intent were the same whether the head of the church wore the papal tiara or the English crown. Two hundred years after Wyckliff, in 1582, laws were still fulminated against "divers false and perverse people of certain new sects," for Protestant England would support but one form of religion as the moral prop of the state. She regarded all innovations as questionable, or wholly evil, and their authors as dangerous men. Chief among the latter was Robert Browne. But before Browne's advent and in the days of Henry the Eighth, there had been a large, respectable, and steadily increasing party whose desire was to remain within the English church, but to purify it from superstitious rites and practices, such as penances, pilgrimages, forced oblations, and votive offerings. They wished also to free the ritual from many customs inherited from the days of Rome's supremacy. It was in this party that the leaven of Protestantism had been working. Luther and Henry, be it remembered, had died within a year of each other. Under the feeble rule of Edward the Sixth, the English reform movement gained rapidly, and, in 1550, upon the refusal of Bishop Hooper to be consecrated in the usual Romish vestments, it began to crystallize in two forms, Separatism and Puritanism.[c] In spite of much opposition, the teachings of Luther, Calvin, and other Continental reformers took root in England, and interested men of widely different classes. They stirred to new activity the scattered and persecuted groups, that, from time to time, had met in secret in London and elsewhere to read the Scriptures and to worship with their elected leaders in some simpler form of service than that prescribed by law. Under Mary's persecution, these Separatists increased, and with other Protestants swelled the roll of martyrs. In her severity, the Queen also drove into exile many able and learned men, who sought shelter in Geneva, Zurich, Basle, and Frankfort, where they were hospitably entertained. Upon their return, there was a marked increase in the Calvinistic tone both of preaching and teaching in the English church and in the university lecture rooms, especially those of Cambridge. Among the most influential teachers was Thomas Cartwright,[d] in 1560-1562, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. While having no sympathy with the nonconformist or Separatist of his day, Cartwright accepted the polity and creed of Calvin in its severer form. He became junior-dean of St. John's, major-fellow of Trinity, and a member of the governing-board. In 1565 he went to Ireland to escape the heated controversy of the period which centred in the "Vestiarian" movement. He was recalled in 1569 to his former professorship, and in September, 1571, was forced out of it because, when controversy changed from vestments to polity, he took extreme views of church discipline and repudiated episcopal government.[e] While Cartwright was very pronounced in his views, his desire at first was that the changes in church polity should be brought about by the united action of the Crown and Parliament. Such had been the method of introducing changes under the three sovereigns, Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth. With this brief summary of the reform movements among the masses and in the universities covering the years until Cartwright, through the influence of the ritualistic church party, was expelled from Cambridge, and Robert Browne, as a student there, came under the strong Puritan influence of the university, we pass to a consideration of Brownism.
Robert Browne was graduated from Cambridge in 1572, the year after Cartwright's expulsion. The next three years he taught in London and "wholly bent himself to search and find out the matters of the church: as to how it was guided and ordered, and what abuses there were in the ecclesiastical government then used." [2] When the plague broke out in London, Browne went to Cambridge. There, he refused to accept the bishop's license to preach, though urged to do so, because he had come to consider it as contrary to the authority of the Scriptures. Nevertheless, he continued preaching until he was silenced by the prelate. Browne then went to Norwich, preaching there and at Bury St. Edmunds, both of which had been gathering-places for the Separatists. At Norwich, he organized a church. Writing of Browne's labors there in 1580 and 1581, Dr. Dexter says: "Here, following the track which he had been long elaborating, he thoroughly discovered and restated the original Congregational way in all its simplicity and symmetry. And here, by his prompting and under his guidance, was formed the first church in modern days of which I have any knowledge, which was intelligently and one might say philosophically Congregational in its platform and processes; he becoming its pastor." [3] Persecution followed Browne to Norwich, and in order to escape it he, in 1581, migrated with his church to Middelburg, in Zealand. There, for two years, he devoted himself to authorship, wherein he set forth his teachings. His books and pamphlets, which had been proscribed in England, were printed in Middelburg and secretly distributed by his friends and followers at home. But Browne's temperament was not of the kind to hold and mould men together, while his doctrine of equality in church government was too strong food for people who, for generations, had been subservient to a system that demanded only their obedience. His church soon disintegrated. With but a remnant of his following, he returned in 1583 by way of Scotland into England, finding everywhere the strong hand of the government stretched out in persecution. Three years later, after having been imprisoned in noisome cells some thirty times within six years, utterly broken in health, if not weakened also in mind, and never feeling safe from arrest while in his own land, Browne finally sought pardon for his offensive teachings and, obtaining it, reentered the English communion. Though he was given a small parish, he was looked upon as a renegade, and died in poverty about 1631, at an extreme old age. He died while the Pilgrim Separatists were still a struggling colony at Plymouth, repudiating the name of Brownists; before the colonial churches had embodied in their system most of the fundamentals of his; and long before the value of his teachings as to democracy, whether in the church or by extension in the state, had dawned upon mankind.
The connecting link between Brownism and Barrowism, whose similarities and dissimilarities we shall consider together, or rather the connecting link between Robert Browne and Henry Barrowe, was another Cambridge student, John Greenwood. He was graduated in 1581, the year that Browne removed to Middelburg. Greenwood had become so enamored with Separatist doctrines, that within five years of his graduation he was deprived of his benefice, in 1586, and sent to prison. While there, he was visited by his friend, Henry Barrowe, a young London lawyer, who, through the chance words of a London preacher, had been converted from a wild, gay life to one devout and godly. During a visit to Greenwood, Barrowe was arrested and sent to Lambeth Palace for examination. Upon refusing to take the oath required by the bishop, Barrowe was remanded to prison to await further examination. Later, he damaged himself and his cause by an unnecessarily bitter denunciation of his enemies and by a too dogmatic assertion of his own principles. Accordingly, he was sent back to prison, where, together with Greenwood, he awaited trial until March, 1593. Then, upon the distorted testimony of their writings, both men were sentenced as seditious fellows, worthy of death. Though twice reprieved at the seemingly last hour, they were hanged together on April 6, 1593.
Both Greenwood and Barrowe frequently asserted that they never had anything to do with Browne. [4] Yet it is probable that it was Browne's influence which turned Greenwood's puritanical convictions to Separatist principles. Barrowe had been graduated from Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1569-70; Browne, from Corpus Christi in 1572. The two men, so different in character, probably did not meet in university days, and certainly not later in London, where one went to a life of pleasure and the other to teaching and to the study of the Scriptures. Greenwood, however, had entered Cambridge in 1577-78, and left it in 1581. Thus he was in college during the two years that Browne was preaching in and near Cambridge. It is safe to assume that the young scholar, soon to become a licensed preacher, and overflowing with the Puritan zeal of his college, might be drawn either through curiosity or admiration to hear the erratic and almost fanatic preacher. Later, when Browne's writings were being secretly distributed in England, both Barrowe and Greenwood had come in contact with the London congregations to whom Browne had preached. The fact that many men in England were thinking along the same lines as the Separatists; that Browne had recanted just as Barrowe and Greenwood were thrust into prison; and that they both disapproved in some measure of Browne's teachings, might account for a denial of discipleship. Browne's influence might even have been unrecognized by the men themselves. Be that as it may, during their long imprisonment, both Barrowe and Greenwood, in their teachings, in their public conferences, and in their writings strove to outline a system of church government and discipline, which was very similar to and yet essentially different from Browne's.
Thus it happened that in the last decade of the sixteenth century two forms of Congregationalism had developed, Brownism and Barrowism. Neither Browne nor Barrowe felt any need, as did their later followers, to demonstrate their doctrinal soundness, because in all matters of creed they "were in full doctrinal sympathy with the predominantly Calvinistic views of the English Established Church from which they had come out."
"Browne, first of all English writers, set forth the Anabaptist doctrine that the civil ruler had no control over the spiritual affairs of the church and that State and Church were separate realms." [5] In the beginning, Browne's foremost wish was not to establish a new church system or polity, but to encourage the spiritual life of the believer. To this end he desired separation from the English church, which, like all other state churches, included all baptized persons, not excommunicate, whether faithful or not to their baptismal or confirmation vows to lead godly lives. [6] Moreover, as Browne did not believe that the magistrates should have power to coerce men's consciences, teaching, as he did, that the mingling of church offices and civil offices was anti-Christian,[7] he was unwilling to wait for a reformation to be brought about by the changing laws of the state.[8] He further advocated such equality of power [9] among the members of the church that in its government a democracy resulted, and this theory, pushed to a logical conclusion, implied that a democratic form of civil government was also the best.[f] Browne roughly draughted a government for the church with pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, and widows. He insisted, however, that these officers did not stand between Christ and the ordinary believer, "though they haue the grace and office of teaching and guiding…. Because eurie one of the church is made Kinge, and Priest and a Prophet, under Christ, to vpholde and further the kingdom of God."
Browne and Barrowe both made the Bible their guide in all matters of church life. From its text they deduced the definition of a true church as, "A company of faithful people gathered by the Word unto Christ and submitting themselves in all things;" of a Christian, as one who had made a "willing covenant with God, and thereby did live a godly and Christian life."[10] This covenanting together of Christians constituted a church. From their interpretation of the New Testament, Browne and Barrowe held that this covenanting included repentance for sin, a profession of faith, and a promise of obedience. Moreover, to their minds, primitive Christianity had insisted upon a public, personal narration of each covenanter's regenerative experience. From sacred writ they derived their church organization also.[ll] Their pastors were for exhorting or "edifying by all comfortable words and promises in the Scriptures, to work in our hearts the estimate of our duties with love and zeal thereunto." Their teachers were for teaching or "delivering the grounds of Religion and meaning of the Scriptures and confirming the same." Both officers were to administer baptism and the Lord's supper, or "the Seals of the Covenant." The elders included both pastors and teachers and also "Ruling Elders," all of whom were for "oversight, counsel, and redressing things amiss," but the ruling elders were to give special attention to the public order and government of the church. According to both Browne and Barrowe, these officers were to be the mouthpiece of the church in the admission, censure, dismissal, or readmission of members. They were to prepare matters to be brought before the church for action. They were also to adjust matters, when possible, so as to avoid overburdening the church or its pastor and teacher with trivial business. In matters spiritual, they were to unite with the pastor and teacher in keeping watch over the lives of the people, that they be of good character and godly reputation.
Browne taught that the church had power which it shared with its officers as fellow-Christians, but which lifted it above them and their office. It lay with the church to elect them. It lay with the church to censure them. Barrowe also maintained that the church was "above its institutions, above its officers," [12] and that every officer was responsible to the church and liable to its censure as well as indebted to it for his election and office. But he further maintained that the members of the church should render meek and submissive, faithful and loving obedience to their chosen elders. Barrowe thus taught that guidance in religious matters should be left in the hands of those to whom by election it had been delegated. The elders were to be men of discernment, able to judge "between cause and cause, plea and plea," to redress evil, and to see that both the people and their officers[g] did their full duty in accordance with the laws of God and the ordinances of the church. Barrowe had seen the confusion and disintegration of Browne's church, and he planned by thus introducing the Calvinistic theory of eldership to avoid the pitfalls into which the Brownists had plunged while practicing their new-found principle of religious equality. Barrowe hoped by his system to secure the independence of the local churches and also to avoid the repellent attitude of a nation that was as yet unprepared to welcome any trend towards democracy.[h] Having devised this system of compromise, Barrowe made a futile attempt to interest Cartwright, but the latter regarded the reformer as too heretical. Yet Cartwright himself, tired of waiting for the better day when his desired reforms should be brought about through the operation of Parliamentary laws, was attempting in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire to test his system of Presbyterianism.
To the list of church officers already enumerated, both reformers added deacons and widows. The deacons were to attend to the church finances and all temporal cares, and, in their visiting of the sick and afflicted, they were to be aided by the widows. The latter office, however, soon fell into disuse, for it was difficult to find women of satisfactory character, attainments, and physical ability, since, in order to avoid scandal or censoriousness, those filling the office had to be of advanced years.
With respect to the relation of the churches among themselves, Browne and Barrowe each insisted upon the integral independence and self-governing powers of the local units. Both approved of the "sisterly advice" of neighboring churches in matters of mutual interest. Both held that in matters of great weight, synods, or councils of all the churches should be summoned; that the delegates to such bodies should advise and bring the wisdom of their united experience to questions affecting the welfare of all the churches, and also, when in consultation upon serious cases, that any one church should lay before them. Browne insisted that delegates to synods should be both ministerial and lay, while Barrowe leaned to the conviction that they should be chosen only from among the church officers. Both reformers limited the power of synods, maintaining that they should be consultative and advisory only. [13] Their decisions were not to be binding upon the churches as were those of the Presbyterian synods,[j] whose authority both reformers regarded as a violation of Gospel rule. The church system, outlined by these two men, became, in time, the organization of the churches of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. The character of their polity fluctuated, as we shall see, leaning sometimes more to Barrowism and sometimes, or in some respects, emphasizing the greater democracy which Browne taught. In England, and because of the pressure of circumstances among English exiles and colonists, Barrowe's teachings at first gained the stronger hold and kept it for many years. Moreover, as Barrowe's almost immediate followers embraced them, there was no objection to the customary union of church and state. And furthermore, if only the state would uphold this peculiar polity, it might even insist upon the payment of contributions, which both Browne and Barrowe had distinctly stated were to be voluntary and were to be the only support of their churches. Though Barrowism was more welcomed, eventually—yet not until long after the colonial period—Brownism triumphed, and it predominates in the Congregationalism of to-day.
The immediate spread of Barrowism was due to the poor Separatists of London. Doubtless among them were many who in the preceding years had listened to Browne and had begun to look up to him as their Luther. While Barrowe and Greenwood were in prison, many of these Separatists had gone to hear them preach and had studied their writings. During the autumn of 1592, there had been some relaxation in the severity exercised toward the prisoners, and Greenwood was allowed occasionally to be out of jail under bail. He associated himself with these Separatists, who, according to Dr. Dexter, had organized a church about five years before, and who at once elected Greenwood to the office of teacher. Dr. John Brown, writing later than Dr. Dexter, claims this London church as the parent of English Congregationalism. To make good the claim, he traces the history of the church by means of references in Bradford's History, Fox's "Book of Martyrs," and in recently discovered state papers to its existence as a Separate church under Elizabeth, when, as early as 1571, its pastor, Richard Fitz, had died in prison. Dr. Brown believes he can still farther trace its origin to Queen Mary's reign, when a Mr. Rough, its pastor, suffered martyrdom, and one Cuthbert Sympson was deacon. [l4] After the death of Greenwood and Barrowe, this London congregation was sore pressed. Their pastor, Francis Johnson, having been thrown into prison, they began to make their way secretly to Amsterdam. There Johnson joined them in 1597, soon after his release. To this London-Amsterdam church were gathered Separatist exiles from all parts of England, for converts were increasing,[k] especially in the rural districts of the north, notwithstanding the fact that persecution followed hard upon conversion.
The policy of Elizabeth during the earlier years of her reign was one of forbearance towards inoffensive Catholics and of toleration towards all Protestants. Caring nothing for religion as such, her aim was to secure peace and to increase the stability of her realm. This she did by crushing malcontent Catholics, by balancing the factions of Protestantism, and by holding in check the extremists, whether High-Churchmen or the ultra-Puritan followers of Cartwright. She had forced on the contending factions a sort of armed truce and silenced the violent antagonism of pulpit against pulpit by licensing preachers. The Acts of Supremacy and of Uniformity placed all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as well as all legislative power, in the hands of the state. They outlined a system of church doctrine and discipline from which no variation was legally permitted. Notwithstanding the enforced outward conformity, the Bible was left open to the masses to study, and private discussion and polemic writing were unrestrained. The main principles of the Reformation were accepted, even while Elizabeth resisted the sweeping reforms which the strong Calvinistic faction of the Puritan party would have made in the ceremonial of the English church. This she did notwithstanding the fact that about the time Thomas Cartwright, through the influence of the ritualists under Whitgift, had been driven from Cambridge, Parliament had refused to bind the clergy to the Three Articles on Supremacy, on the form of Church government, and on the power of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies. Parliament had even suggested a reform of the liturgy by omitting from it those ceremonies most obnoxious to the Puritan party.[l] That representative assembly had but reflected the desire of all moderate statesmen, as well as of the Puritans. But, in the twelve years between Cartwright's dismissal from Cambridge and Browne's preaching there without a license, a great change took place, altering the sentiment of the nation. All but extremists drew back when Cartwright pushed his Presbyterian notions to the point of asserting that the only power which the state rightfully held over religion was to see that the decrees of the churches were executed and their contemners punished, or when this reformer still further asserted that the power and authority of the church was derived from the Gospel and consequently was above Queen or Parliament. Cartwright claimed for his church an infallibility and control of its members far above the claims of Rome, and, tired of waiting for a purification of existing conditions by legislative acts, he had, as has been said, boldly organized, in accordance with his system, the clergy of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. The local churches were treated as self-governing units, but were controlled by a series of authoritative Classes and Synods. Having done this, Cartwright called for the establishment of Presbyterianism as the national church and for the vigorous suppression of Episcopacy, Separatism, and all variations from his standard. As he thus struck at the national church, at the Queen's supremacy, and, seemingly to many Englishmen, at the very roots of civil government and security, there was a sudden halt in the reform movement. The impetus which would have probably brought about all the changes that the great body of Puritans desired was arrested. Richard Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" swept the ground from under Thomas Cartwright's "Admonition to Parliament." Hooker's broad and philosophic reasoning showed that no one system of church-government was immutable; that all were temporary; and that not upon any man's interpretation of Scripture, or upon that of any group of men alone, could the divine ordering of the world, of the church or of the state, be based. Such order depended upon moral relations, upon social and political institutions, and changed with times and nations.
The death of Mary Queen of Scots crushed the Catholic party, and the defeat of the Armada left Elizabeth free to turn her attention to the phases of the Protestant movement in her own realm. While Browne was preaching in Norwich, the Queen raised Whitgift to the See of Canterbury. He was the bitter opponent of all nonconformity, and immediately the persecution both of Separatists and of Puritans became severe. Elizabeth, sure at last of her throne and of her position as head of the Protestant cause in Europe, gave her minister a free hand. She demanded rigid conformity, but wisely forbore to revive many of the customs which the Puritans had succeeded in rendering obsolete. Notwithstanding such modifications, the English liturgy had been so slightly altered that, "Pius the Fifth did see so little variation in it from the Latin service that had been formerly used in that Kingdom that he would have ratified it by his authority, if the Queen would have so received it."[m] Elizabeth now forbade all preaching, teaching, and catechising in private houses, and refused to recognize lay or Presbyterian ordination. Ministers who could no longer accept episcopal ordination, or subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, or approve the Book of Common Prayer and conform to its liturgy were silenced and deprived of their salaries. In default of witnesses, charges against them were proved by their own testimony under oath, whereby they were made to incriminate themselves. The censorship of the press was made stringent, printing was restricted to London and to the two universities, and all printers had to be licensed. Furthermore, all publications, even pamphlets, had to receive the approval of the Primate or of the Bishop of London. In addition, the Queen established the Ecclesiastical Commission of forty-four members, which became a permanent court where all authority virtually centred in the hands of the archbishops. English law had not as yet defined the powers and limitations of the Protestant clergy. Consequently, this Commission assumed almost unlimited powers and cared little for its own precedents. Its very existence undid a large part of the work of the Reformation, and the successive Archbishops of Canterbury, Parker, Whitgift, Bancroft, Abbott, and Laud, claimed greater and more despotic authority than any papal primate since the days of Augustine. The Commission passed upon all opinions or acts which it held to be contrary to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. It altered or amended the Statutes of Schools and Colleges; it claimed the right of deprivation of clergy and held them at its mercy; it passed from decisions upon heresy, schism, or nonconformity to judgment and sentence upon incest and similar crimes. It could fine and imprison at will, and employ any measures for securing information or calling witnesses. The result was that all nonconformists and all Puritans drew closer together under trial. Another result was that the Bible was studied more earnestly in private, and that there was a public eager to read the religious books and pamphlets published abroad and cautiously circulated in England. Though the Presbyterians were confined to the nonconformist clergy and to a comparatively small number among them, they were rising in importance, and were accorded sympathetic recognition as a section of the Puritan party. This party, as a whole, continued to increase its membership. The Separatists also increased, for, as of old, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.
The hope that times would mend when James ascended the throne was soon abandoned. As he had been trained in Scotch Presbyterianism, the Presbyterians believed that he would grant them some favor, while the Puritans looked for some conciliatory measures. Eight hundred Puritan ministers, a tenth of all the clergy, signed the "Millenary Petition," asking that the practices which they most abhorred, such as the sign of the cross in baptism, the use of the surplice, the giving of the ring at marriage, and the kneeling during the communion service, should be done away with. The petition was not Presbyterian, but was strictly Puritan in tone. It asked for no change in the government or organization of the church. It did ask for a reform in the ecclesiastical courts, and it demanded provision for the training of godly ministers. James replied to the petition by promising a conference of prelates and of Puritan ministers to consider their demands; but at the conference it was found that he had summpned it only to air the theological knowledge upon which he so greatly prided himself. His answer to the petition was that he would have "one doctrine, one religion, in substance and in ceremony," and of the remonstrants he added, "I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land." The harrying began. The recently organized Separatist church at Gainsborough-on-Trent endured persecution for four years, and then emigrated with its pastor, John Smyth, M.A., of Christ's College, Cambridge. It found refuge in Amsterdam by the side of the London-Amsterdam church and its pastor, Francis Johnson, who had been Smyth's tutor in college days. The next year, after more of the King's harrying, the future colonists of Plymouth, the Separatist Church of Scrooby, an offshoot of the Gainsborough church, attempted to flee over seas to Holland. The magistrates would not give them leave to go, and to emigrate without permission had been counted a crime since the reign of Richard II. Their first attempt to leave the country was defeated and their leaders imprisoned. During their second attempt, after a large number of their men had reached the ship with many of their household goods, and while their wives and children were waiting to embark, those on the beach were surprised and arrested, and their goods confiscated. Public opinion forbade sending helpless women and children to prison for no other offense than agreeing with and wishing to join their husbands and fathers. Consequently the magistrates let their prisoners go, but made no provision for them. Helpless and destitute, they were taken in and cared for by the people of the countryside, and sheltered until their men returned. The latter had suffered shipwreck, because the Dutch captain had attempted to sail away when he saw the approach of the English officers. When the church had once more raised sufficient funds for the emigration, the magistrates gave them a contemptuous permission to depart, "glad to be rid of them at any price." So, in 1608, they also joined the English exiles in Amsterdam. The rank injustice and cruelty of their treatment, together with their patience and forbearance under their sufferings, drew people's attention to the character and worth of the pious "pilgrims" and Separatists whom James was constantly driving forth from England.
Meanwhile, both in England and on the continent, the Separatists held fast to the principles of their leaders, of which the cardinal ones were a church wherein membership was not by birthright, but by "conversion;" over which magistrates or government should have no control; in which each congregation constituted an independent unit, coequal with all others; and with which the state should have nothing more to do than to see that members respected the decrees of the church and were obedient to its discipline.
On the continent, the Separatists elaborated these fundamentals and developed detailed and systematic expression of them. Such were the "True Description out of the Word of God of the Visible Church" of the London-Amsterdam church, put forth in 1589, and in which Barrowe himself outlined his system; the "True Confession," issued by the same church about ten years later; "The Points of Difference," some fourteen in number, in which the London-Amsterdam church set forth wherein it differed from the English church; and the "Seven Articles," signed by John Robinson and William Brewster. This last document the exiled Scrooby church sent from Leyden to the English Council of State in 1617, with the hope of convincing King James that if allowed to go to America under the Virginia patent, and to worship there in their own fashion, they would be desirable colonists and law-abiding subjects. The "True Confession"[n] sets forth the nature, powers, order, and officers of the church. It limits the sacraments to the members, and baptism to their children. It insists upon the wisdom of churches seeking advice from one another, and of their use of certificates of membership so as to guard against the admission of strangers coming from other churches, and possibly of unworthy character. In the definition of eldership, the "True Confession" passes out of the haze in which Barrowe's "True Description" left the conflicting powers of the eldership, and of the church. It plainly asserts that the elders have the power of guidance and also of control, should members attempt to censure them or to interfere in matters beyond their knowledge. This platform also insists that magistrates should uphold the church which it defines, because it is the one true church, and that they should oppose all others as anti-Christian. [15] In the "Points of Difference," stress is again laid upon the covenant-nature of the church, upon its voluntary support, upon the right of election of officers, and upon the abolishment of "Popish Canons, Courts, Classes, Customs or any human inventions," including the Popish liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, and "all Monuments of Idolatry in garments or in other things, and all Temples, Chapels, etc." Many of the Puritans desired these same changes. Many favored a polity giving the local churches some degree of choice in the election of their officers. If the "Points of Difference" aimed to lay bare the errors of Episcopacy and of Presbyterianism as well as to demonstrate the superior merits of the new aspirant for the status of a national church, the "Seven Articles" [16] aimed to minimize differences in church usage by omitting mention of them when possible and by emphasizing agreement. The evident advance along the line of a more authoritative eldership had developed out of the experience of the first two English churches in Amsterdam. John Robinson and his followers had held more closely to Robert Browne's standard of Congregationalism, for Robinson maintained that the government of the church should be vested in its membership rather than in its eldership alone. In order to maintain this principle in greater purity, Robinson withdrew his fold from their first resting-place in Amsterdam to Leyden. Richard Clyfton, who had been pastor of the church in Scrooby, remained in Amsterdam, partly because he felt too old to migrate again, and partly because he leaned to Francis Johnson's more aristocratic theories of church government. These divergent views caused trouble in the Amsterdam churches, and Robinson wished to be far enough away to be out of the vortex of doctrinal eddies. For eleven years his people lived a peaceful and exemplary church life in Leyden, and it was chiefly their longing to rear their children in an English home and under English influences that made them anxious to emigrate to America. As the years passed, Robinson sympathized more with the Barrowistic standards of other churches and came also to regard more leniently the English Established Church as one having true religion under corrupt forms and ceremonies, and accordingly one with which he could hold a limited fellowship. This was a step in the approachment of Separatist and Puritan, and Robinson was a most influential writer. Of necessity, his work was largely controversial, but he wrote from the standpoint of defense, and rarely departed from a broad and kindly spirit. In the "Seven Articles" Robinson admits the royal supremacy in so far as to countenance a passive obedience. His teaching had the greatest influence in shaping the religious life of the first and second generation of New Englanders.
The Separatists who remained in England devoted themselves to the discussion of particular topics rather than to platforms of faith and discipline. Many of the writers were men who, like the pastors of two of the exiled churches, were at first ministers in good standing in the English church; but, later, had allowed their Puritan tendencies to outrun the bounds of that party and to become convictions that the Bible commanded their separation from the Establishment as witnesses to the corruptions it countenanced. Poring over the Bible story, they had become enamored with the simplicity of the Gospel age.
From the days of Elizabeth, the English nation became more and more a people of one book, and that book the Bible. As, deeply dyed with Calvinism, they read over and over its sacred pages, they became a serious, sombre, purposeful—and almost fanatic people. The faults and extravagances of the Puritan party and of the later Commonwealth do not at this time concern us. It is with their purposefulness, their determination to make the church a home of vigorous and visible righteousness, and to preserve their ecclesiastical and civil liberties from the encroachment of Stuart pretensions, that we have to do. More and more, as has been said, the Puritan was coming to the conviction that the best way to reform the church would be to substitute some restrictive policy for her all-embracing membership, or, at least, to supplement it by such measures of local church discipline as should practically exclude the unregenerate and the immoral. Again, the Church of England could be arraigned as a politico-ecclesiastical institution, and in the pages of the Bible, King James's theory of the divine right of kings and bishops found no support. It was obnoxious alike to Separatist and Puritan, and James's Puritan subjects had the sympathy of more than three fourths of the squires and burgesses in the king's first Parliament of 1604, while the Separatists counted some twenty thousand converts in his realm. The Puritan opposition was a formidable one to provoke. Yet "the wisest fool in Christendom" jeered at its clergy and scolded its representatives in Parliament for daring to warn him, in their reply to his boasted divine right of kings, that
Your majesty would be misinformed if any man should deliver that the Kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to alter religion, or to make any laws concerning the same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament.
It was the extravagant claims for himself and his bishops, coupled with his lawless overriding of justice and his profligate use of the national wealth, that undermined the king's throne and prepared the downfall of the House of Stuart. Notwithstanding the remonstrance of Parliament, James's insistence upon his divine right, by very force of reiteration, whether his own or that of the clergy who favored royalty, won a growing recognition from a conservative people. For his king as the political head of the nation, the Puritan had all the Englishman's half-idolatrous reverence, until James's own acts outraged justice and substituted contempt.
The self-restraint for which every Separatist, every Puritan, strove, was characteristic of the great reform party. They asked only for ecclesiastical betterment, for the reform of the ecclesiastical courts, for provision for a godly ministry, and for the suppression of "Popish usages." These requests of the "Millenary Petition" were, after the Guy Fawkes plot, urged with all the intensity of a people who, as they looked abroad upon the feeble and warring Protestantism of Europe, and at home upon the attempt to revive Romanism, believed themselves the sole hope and savior of the Protestant cause. Persecution had created a small measure of tolerance throughout all nonconformist bodies. Fear of the revival of Catholicism, the renewed attempt to enforce the Three Articles, the dismissal from their parishes of three hundred Puritan ministers, and the hand and glove policy of the king and his bishops, welded together the variants in the Puritan party. The desire for personal righteousness, for morality in church and state, which had seized upon the masses in the nation, stood aghast at the profligacy of the king and his courtiers. Reason seemed to cry aloud for reform, preferably for a reform that should be free from every trace of the old hypocrisies, but which should be strong within the old episcopal system which had endured for centuries and which still kept its hold upon the vast majority of the people. And to this idea of reform the great Puritan party clung, until the exactions of the Stuarts, their suppression of both religious and civil rights, forced upon it a civil war and the formation of the Commonwealth. As a preliminary training of the men of the Puritan armies and of the Commonwealth, and for their great contest, all the years of Bible study, of controversial writing, of individual suffering, were needed. These brought forth the necessary moral earnestness, the mental acumen, the enduring strength. These qualities, though most noticeable in the leaders, were well-nigh universal traits. Every common soldier felt himself the equal of his officer as a soldier of God, a defender of the faith, and a necessary builder of Christ's new kingdom upon earth. To this growing sense of democracy, to this sense of personal responsibility and self-sacrifice, the teaching, the writings, and the sufferings of the oppressed Separatists, as well as those of the persecuted Puritans, had contributed.
When, in 1620, James I permitted the Pilgrims of Leyden to emigrate, they planted in Plymouth of New England the first American Congregational church and erected there the first American commonwealth. The influence of this Separatist church upon New England religious life belongs to another chapter. Here it is only necessary to repeat that its members differed not at all in creed, only in polity, from the English established church out of which they had originally come. With the English Puritan they were one in faith, while they differed little from him in theories of church government, though much in practice. In America, the Plymouth colonists at once set up the same church polity as in Leyden, one from which, as has been shown, many of the English Puritans would have borrowed the features of a converted or covenant membership and of local self-government, or at least some measure of it. Eight years were to elapse before the great Puritan exodus began. In those eight years both parties, through the discipline of time, were to be brought still nearer to a common standard of church life. When the vanguard of the Puritans reached the Massachusetts shore, the Plymouth church stood ready to extend the right hand of fellowship. How it did so, and how it impressed itself upon the church life in the three colonies of Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut, is a part of the story of the earliest period of colonial Congregationalism.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] "Our pious Ancestors transported themselves with regard unto
Church Order and Discipline, not with respect to the Fundamentals in
Doctrine."—Richard Mather, Attestation to the Ratio
Disciplina, p. 10.
"The issue on which the Pilgrims and Puritans alike left sweet fields and comfortable homes and settled ways of the land of their birth for this raw wilderness, was primarily an issue of politics rather than of the substance of religious life."—G. L. Walker, Some Aspects of Religious Life in New England, p. 19.
"After the 17th century 'Independent' was chiefly used in England, while 'Congregational' was decidedly preferred in New England, where the 'consociation' of the churches formed a more important feature of the system." "Congregational" first appeared in manuscript in 1639, in print in 1642. "Congregationalist" appeared in 1692, and "Congregationalism," not until 1716.—J. Murray, A New English Dict. on Hist. Principles.
[c] Separatism is commonly said to date from the year 1554. About 1564, the other branch of the reform party was nicknamed "Puritan."—G. L. Walker, History of the First Church in Hartford, p. 6.
[d] Another noted preacher who left an indelible impression upon several early New England ministers was William Perkins, who was in discourse "strenuous, searching, and ultra-Calvinistic." He was a Cambridge man, filling the positions of Professor of Divinity, Master of Trinity, and Chancellor of the University.—G. L. Walker, Some Aspects of the Religious Life in New England, p. 14.
[e] Cartwright in 1574, the year of its publication, translated Travers's Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ab illa Aberrationis, plena e verbo Dei & dilucida Explicatio, and made it the basis of a practical attempt to introduce the Presbyterian system into England. More than five hundred of the clergy seconded his attempt, subscribing to the principles that (1) there can be only one right form of church government, but one church order and one form of church, namely, that described in the Scriptures; (2) that every local church should have a presbytery of elders to direct its affairs; and (3) that every church should obey the combined opinion of all the churches in fellowship with it. In this declaration lay a blow at the Queen's supremacy.—H. M. Dexter, Congregationalism as seen in Lit. p. 55.
[f] "Browne's polity was essentially, though unintentionally, democratic, and that gives it a closer resemblance in some features to the purely democratic Congregationalism of the present century, than to the more aristocratic, one might almost say semi-Presbyterianized, Congregationalism of Barrowe and the founders of New England. His picture of the covenant relation of men in the church, under the immediate sovereignty of God, he extended to the state; and it led him as directly, and probably as unintentionally, to democracy in the one field as in the other. His theory implied that all governors should rule by the will of the governed, and made the basis of the state on its human side essentially a compact."—W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms, pp. 15, 16. See also H. M. Dexter, Congregationalism as seen in Lit., pp. 96-107; 235-39; 351; R. Browne, Book which Sheweth, Def., 51.
[g] Barrowe wrote, "Though there be communion in the Church, yet is there no equality." This is in strong contrast to Browne's, "Every one of the church is made King and Priest and Prophet under Christ to uphold and further the kingdom of God." Barrowe continues, "The Church of Christ is to obey and submit unto her leaders…. The Church knoweth how to give reverence unto her leaders." In his True Description there is a hazy attempt to define how far the membership of the church may judge its elders. This authority of the elders was defined more clearly and elaborated by Barrowe's followers in their True Confession, published in Amsterdam in 1596-98.—H. Barrowe, A True Description; Discovery of False Churches, p. 188; A Plain Refutation of Mr. Gifford, p. 129 (ed. of 1605).
[h] "Traces of this (Barrowe's) innovation on apostolic Congregationalism have been aptly characterized as a Presbyterian heart within a Congregational body, and are seen long after the denomination grew to be a power in New England."—A. E. Dunning, Congregationalists in America, p. 61.
Barrowe says, "over sixty."
[j] The first English Presbytery was organized in 1572. Among its organizers, there was the seeming determination to treat the Episcopal system as a mere legal appendage.—F. J. Powicke, Henry Barrowe, p. 139.
[k] At the height of its prosperity this church contained about three hundred communicants, with representatives from twenty-nine English counties. Among them was one John Bolton, who had been a member of Mr. Fitz's church in 1571. At the beginning of James the First's reign, 1603, Separatist converts numbered 20,000 souls in England.
[l] "The wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the dislike of superstitious usages, of the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the clergy and laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost all the higher churchmen but Parker were opposed to them, and a motion for their abolition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote."—J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, p. 459.
[m] John Davenport, in his Answer to the Letter of Many Ministers in Old England, p. 3.
[n] Its full title is "A True Confession of the Faith and Humble Acknowledgement of the Allegeance which wee his Majestes Subjects falsely called Brownists, doo hould towards God and yeild his Majestie and all others that are over us in the Lord."
CHAPTER II
THE TRANSPLANTING OF CONGREGATIONALISM
Those who cross the sea change not their affection but their skies.—Horace.
The rule of absolutism forced the transplanting of a democratic church. The arrogance of the House of Stuart compelled English Puritans to seek refuge in America. The exercise of the divine right of kings and of the divine power of bishops provoked the commonwealths of New England and the development there of the Congregational church, as later it brought the Commonwealth of Cromwell, with its tolerance of Independent and Presbyterian.
When the Pilgrims left England, the Puritans had entered upon their long contest with James over their ecclesiastical and also their constitutional rights. At his accession, the king had seemed inclined to tolerate the Catholics. Yet only a short time elapsed before many Romanists were found upon the proscribed lists. The Guy Fawkes plot followed. Its scope, its narrow margin of failure, coupled with the king's previous leniency towards Catholics and his bitter persecution of nonconformists, created a frenzy of fear among Protestants. Immediately the Puritans saw in every objectionable ceremonial of the English church some hidden purpose, some Jesuitical contrivance for overthrowing Protestantism. And as the ritualistic clergy made their pulpits resound with the doctrines of the divine right of kings, the divine right of bishops, and of passive obedience, and as they thundered at the preachers who opposed or denied these principles, the high-church party came to be associated more and more with the unconstitutional policy of the king. And this was so, notwithstanding the praiseworthy efforts of Archbishop Abbott to modify the practical working of these royal notions. This archbishop of Canterbury was a man of great learning and of gentle spirit. His name stands second among the translators of King James's version, while as head of the Ecclesiastical Commission his power was great, his influence far reaching. So earnestly did he strive to moderate the king's severity toward nonconformists, to bring about a compromise between the two great church parties, and so simple was the ritual in his palace at Lambeth, that many people believed the kindly prelate was more than half a Puritan at heart. He even refused to license the publication of a sermon that most unduly exalted the king's prerogative, and he forbade the reading of James's proclamation permitting games and sports on Sunday. This proclamation was the famous "Book of Sports," and many Puritan clergymen paid dearly for refusing to read it to their congregations. Its issue exasperated and discouraged the reform party, and, from this time, the Puritans began to lose hope that any moral or religious betterment would be permitted among the people.
In the constitutional imbroglio, James resented the attempt of Parliament to curb his extravagance by its method of granting him money on condition that he would make ecclesiastical reforms and grant the redress of other grievances. When the king grew angry and attempted to rule without a Parliament, the Puritan party broadened its purpose and became the champion also of civil liberty. Among his offenses, James refused to restore to their pulpits three hundred Puritan ministers whom, in 1605, he silenced for not accepting the Three Articles, notwithstanding the fact that Parliament itself had refused to make them binding upon the clergy. The king also refused to define the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and to respect the limitation of the powers of the High Court of Commission when they were determined by the judges. And further, James positively refused to admit that with Parliament alone rested the power to levy imposts and duties. After wrangling with his first Parliament for seven years over these and similar questions, the king ruled for the next three without that representative body. Finding it necessary, in 1614, to convene his lords, squires, and burgesses, the king was disappointed to find that the new Parliament was no more pliable to his will than its predecessor had been, and he shortly dissolved it. The great leaders of the opposition, such as Coke, Eliot, Pym, Selden and Hampden, were not all Puritans, but these men, and others of their kind, joined with the reform party in demanding that the rights of the people should be respected and the evils of government redressed. James's whole reign was marked by quarrels with a stubborn Parliament and by periods of absolute rule that were characterized by forced loans and other unlawful extortions.
Upon the death of James, in 1625, the nation turned hopefully to the young prince, who thus far had pleased them in many ways. In contrast to the ungainly, rickety, garrulous James, Charles was kingly in appearance, bearing, and demeanor. He was reserved in speech and manner. So far, the stubbornness which he had inherited from his father was mistaken for a strong will, and his attitude towards Spain, after the failure of the Catholic marriage which had been arranged for him, was regarded as indicating his strong Protestantism. It took but a short time, however, to reveal his stubbornness, his vanity, pique, extravagance, and insincerity. Within four years, he had dissolved Parliament three times, had sent Sir John Eliot to the Tower for boldly defending the rights of the people, had dismissed the Chief Justice from office for refusing to recognize as legal taxes laid without consent of Parliament, had thrown John Hampden into prison for refusing to pay a forced loan, and, finally, had signed the "Petition of Rights" [17] in 1628, only to violate it almost as soon as the contemporary bill for subsidies had been passed. Charles, finding he could not coerce Parliament, dissolved it, and entered upon his twelve years of absolute rule, marked by imprisonments, by arbitrary fines, forced loans, sales of monopolies, and illegal taxes, which raised the annual revenue from £500,000 to £800,000. [18]
It was during the first years of Charles's misrule—to be specific, in 1627—that "some friends being together in Lincolnshire fell into discourse about New England and the planting of the Gospel there." Among them were, probably, Thomas Dudley (who mentions the discussion in a letter to the Countess of Lincoln), Atherton Hough, Thomas Leverett, and possibly also John Cotton and Roger Williams, for all these men were wont to assemble at Tattersall Castle, the family seat of Lord Lincoln. The latter was, in religious matters, a staunch Puritan, and in political, a fearless opponent of forced loans and illegal measures. Thomas Dudley was his steward and confidential adviser, and the others were his personal friends and, in politics, his loyal followers. These men, afterwards prominent in New England, had watched with interest the fortunes of the Plymouth Colony, and now concluded that since England lay helpless in the grasp of Charles the time had come to prepare somewhere in the American wilderness a refuge and home for oppressed Englishmen and persecuted Puritans. This little group of men began at once to correspond with others in London and also in the west of England who were like-minded with themselves. Men of the west, in and about Dorchester, had for some four years or more been interested in the New England fisheries between the Kennebec and Cape Ann. On that promontory they had landed some fourteen men, hoping to start a permanent settlement. The plan had failed, the partnership had been dissolved, and a few of the settlers had removed to Salem, Massachusetts. The Rev. John White, the Puritan rector of Salem, England, saw a great opportunity. He at once interested some wealthy merchants to make Salem, in Massachusetts, the first post in a colonization scheme of great magnitude, and as leader of an advance party they secured John Endicott. From the council for New England the company secured a patent on March 19, 1628, for the lands between the Merrimac and the Charles rivers. On June 20, 1628, thirteen days after Charles had signed the "Petition of Rights" that he was so soon to violate, the advance guard of the colonists set sail for Salem, in the New World, arriving there early in the following September.
In America, friendly relations were soon established between the settlers of Salem and Plymouth. On the voyage over, sickness, due to the unwholesome salt in which some of their provisions had been packed, broke out among the Salem colonists, and continuing in the settlement, forced Endicott to send to Plymouth for Dr. Samuel Fuller, deacon in the church there. He was skilled both in medicine and in church-lore, for he had also been one of the two deacons in the church during its Leyden days. He worked among the disabled at Salem, and, later, among the sick colonists at Boston, paving the way for a better understanding and closer friendship with the Plymouth settlers. There had been a tendency to look upon these earlier colonists as extremists. Their enemies in derision called them "Brownists." They did in truth cling most firmly to Browne's doctrine that the civil magistrate had no control over the church of Christ. In their opinion, the function of the civil power in any union of church and state was limited to upholding the spiritual power by approving the church's discipline, since that had for its object the moral welfare of the people. As Endicott and Fuller talked together of all that in their hearts they both desired for the church of the future, they realized that they agreed on many points. The Plymouth church had been virtually under the sole rule of its elder, William Brewster, during the greater part of its life in America, for its aged pastor had died before he could rejoin his flock. Such government had tended to modify the early insistence upon the principle that the power of the church was "above that of its officers." This doctrine was associated in men's minds more with Robert Browne, who had originated it, than with Henry Barrowe, who had modified it, and it was towards Barrowism that the larger body of Puritans were drawn.
The Salem people, in their isolation three thousand miles from the home-land, felt the necessity of some form of church organization. As they had fled from the offensive ceremonial of the English Church, they determined to be free from cross and prayer-book, and from anything suggestive of offense. In the great matter of membership and constitution, their new church was to be brought still nearer to the requirements and simplicity of Gospel standards. More and more Puritans were coming to prefer the church of "covenant membership" to the birthright membership of the English Establishment. Many were urging a limited independence in the organization, management, and discipline of members of local churches. Some among the Puritans had adopted the Presbyterian polity, while many preferred that form of ordination. Such ordination had been accepted as valid for English clergymen during the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign. It was still so recognized by all the English clergy for the ministers of the Reformed churches on the Continent, and with such, English clergymen of all opinions still continued to hold very friendly intercourse. It was not until Laud's ascendency that claims for the divine right of Episcopacy, to the exclusion of other branches of the Christian faith, were strenuously urged. Thus it happened that after many conferences, Endicott could write to Governor Bradford in May of 1629, that:—
I acknowledge myself much bound to you for your kind love and care in sending Mr. Samuel Fuller among us, and rejoice much that I am by him satisfied touching your judgment of the outward form of God's worship. It is, as far as I can gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth, and the same which I have ever professed and maintained ever since the Lord in mercy revealed Himself unto me: being far from the common report that hath been spread of you touching that particular.
Endicott further expresses the wish that they may all "as Christian brethren be united by a heavenly and unfeigned love;" that as servants of one Master and of one household they should not be strangers, but be "marked with one and the same mark, and sealed with one and the same seal, and have, for the main, one and the same heart guided by one and the same Spirit of truth," and that they should bend their hearts and forces to the furthering of the work for which they had come into the wilderness. Thus, Salem had decided upon the type of church her people wanted, while she still waited for the ministers who were coming with the larger number of her colonists, and whom she believed competent to guide her religious life.
Only a few weeks after the sending of Endicott's letter to Governor Bradford, five vessels arrived, bringing several hundred well-equipped colonists. They had been sent out by the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay. This corporation had bought out the Salem Company, and was backed by the most influential Puritans of wealth and social prominence, by men who had lost all hope of either religious or civil freedom when Laud had been raised to the bishopric of London and when Charles persisted in his despotic government. By the elevation of Laud to the bishopric of London, Charles offended the most puritanically inclined diocese in England, and the whole Puritan party. In his new office, Laud quickly succeeded in severing communication between the Reformed churches on the Continent and those in England. He strictly prohibited the common people from using the annotated pocket-Bibles sent out by the Genevan press. He forbade the entrance into office of nonconformists as lecturers or chaplains. He put an end to feofments, so that puritanically inclined men of wealth could no longer control the livings. He excluded suspended ministers from teaching, and also from the practice of medicine, and even forbade their entering business life. He required absolute conformity to his own high-church standards. He insisted upon doing away with all Calvinistic innovations tending to simplicity of ritual, and upon reviving many ecclesiastical ceremonies which had fallen into disuse. Hence, English Puritans saw in America the only hope of the future, and began that exodus which, during the next ten years, or more, annually sent two thousand emigrants to the Massachusetts shore to find homes throughout New England. Of these, the Salem colonists were the first large body of Puritans to emigrate. Among them were three ministers, Endicott's former pastor Samuel Skelton, Francis Higginson, and Francis Bright.
When Higginson and Skelton learned of the friendship with Plymouth, and that Endicott had adopted the system of church organization established in the older settlement, they accepted it as being in accord with the principles of the Reformed churches on the Continent, whose pattern they had themselves resolved to follow in organizing the church at Salem. Not so Francis Bright. He could not agree with the others, and so withdrew to Charlestown in order not to embarrass the young church. Higginson and Skelton were each, in turn questioned as to their conception of a minister's calling. Replying that it was twofold: a call from within to a conviction that a man was chosen of God to be His minister, and thereby endowed with proper gifts, and a call from without by the free choice of a "covenanted church" to be its pastor, they were accepted as satisfactory candidates for the two highest offices in the Salem church. Later, upon an appointed day of prayer and fasting, July 20, 1629, the people by written ballot chose Francis Skelton to be their pastor and Thomas Higginson their teacher. When they had accepted their election, "first Mr. Higginson, with three or four of the gravest members of the church, laid their hands upon Mr. Skelton, using prayer therewith. This being done, there was imposition of hands upon Mr. Higginson also." Upon a still later day of prayer and humiliation, August 6, elders and deacons were chosen and ordained. Upon this day, the two ministers and many among the people gave their assent to the Confession and Covenant which the pastor and teacher had revised. At the second of these two important meetings, Governor Bradford and delegates from the Plymouth church were present. "Coming by sea they were hindered by cross-winds that they could not be there at the beginning of the day; but they came into the assembly afterward, and gave them the right hand of fellowship, wishing all prosperity and all blessedness to such good beginnings." [19] The Salem covenant in its original form was a single sentence: "We covenant with the Lord and with one another; and doe bynd ourselves in the presence of God to walk together in all his wayes, according as he is pleased to reveale him' self unto us in his Blessed word of truth." [20]
The formation of the church of Salem by covenant practice[a] marked the beginning of the Congregational polity among the Puritan body; their local ordination of their minister, the break with English Episcopacy, though, for a considerable while longer, the colonists still spoke of themselves as members of the Church of England, for both the colonial and the home authorities were equally anxious to avoid the stigma of Separatism.
The next large body of colonists to leave England was Governor Winthrop's company, and, upon their arrival, the Boston church quickly followed the example of Salem. Next, the Dorchester church, afterwards the church of Windsor, Connecticut, emigrated as a body from Plymouth, England, where, before embarking, its members seem to have taken some form of membership pledge,—an unusual proceeding, but operating to put this church in line with those already organized in Plymouth and Massachusetts. The Watertown church, whence emigrants were to settle Wethersfield, Connecticut, also organized with a covenant similar to that of Salem and Boston. These four oldest congregations set the type for the thirty-five New England churches that were founded previous to 1640, as well as for the later ones that followed the standard thus early set up by Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. There was some variation in the form of covenant, and to it a brief confession of faith, or creed, was early added. There was some variation also in the interpretation of the laying on of hands in ordination as to whether it was to be considered, in cases where the candidate had previously been ordained in England, as ordination or as confirmation of that previously received.[c] In regard to officers, the churches at first provided themselves with pastor, ruling elders (one or two, but generally only one), and deacons. There were exceptions among them, as at Plymouth, where there was no pastor for ten years, and in which there had never been a teacher, for John Robinson had filled both offices. As the first generation of colonists passed away, partly because of lack of fit candidates, partly because of the kinship of the two offices of pastor and teacher, and partly because of the heavy expense in supporting both, the office of teacher was dropped. The ruling eldership also was gradually discontinued; but at first the churches generally had, with the exception of widows, the full complement of officers as appointed by Browne and Barrowe. The usual order of worship was (1) Prayer. (2) Psalm. (3) Scripture reading, followed by the pastor's preaching to explain and apply it. (4) Prophesying or exhortation, the elders calling for speakers, whether members or guests from other churches. (5) Questions from old or young, women excepted. (6) Occasional administration of the Lord's Supper or of Baptism, rites known as the administration of "the Seals of the Covenant." (7) Psalm. (8) Collection. (9) Dismissal with blessing. Such were the New England churches, the churches of a transplanted creed and race. They were Calvinistic in dogma, democratic in organization, and of extreme simplicity in their order of worship.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] This fundamental principle of Congregationalism belonged to the Separatists and was one of their distinctive tenets. It was never adopted by the English Puritans as a body, nor was ordination by a local church. The Dorchester church had some form of pledge at the time of its organization. So also, possibly, because influenced by Dutch example, did Rev. Hugh Peter's church in Rotterdam. But these were exceptions.—W. Walker, Hist, of Cong., p. 192.
The evolution of the Salem covenant and creed is given in detail in W. Walker's Creeds and Platforms, pp. 99-122.
The Windsor Creed of 1647, though not covering the range of Christian doctrine, contained in simple phrase the essentials of Gospel redemption from sin through repentance and faith in the atoning work of Christ and a life of love toward God and our neighbor, through the strength which comes from him.—W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms, p. 154.
[c] The evolution of the Salem covenant and creed is given in detail in W. Walker's Creeds and Platforms, pp. 99-122.
The Windsor Creed of 1647, though not covering the range of Christian doctrine, contained in simple phrase the essentials of Gospel redemption from sin through repentance and faith in the atoning work of Christ and a life of love toward God and our neighbor, through the strength which comes from him.—W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms, p. 154.
CHAPTER III
CHURCH AND STATE IN NEW ENGLAND
For God and the Church!
With the great Puritan body in England, and with the great mass of the English nation, whatever their religious opinions, the colonists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven held in common one foremost theory of civil government. Pausing for a brief consideration of this fundamental and far-reaching theory, which created so many difficulties in the infant commonwealths, and which confronts us again and again as we follow their later history, we find that the Pilgrim Separatist of Plymouth, the strict Puritan of Massachusetts, the voter in the theocratic commonwealth of New Haven, and the holder of the liberal franchise in Connecticut, all clung to the proposition that the State's first duty was the maintenance and support of religion. Thereby they meant enforced taxation for the support of its predominant type, conformity to its mode of worship, and in the last analysis supervision or control of the Church by the State or by the General Court of each colony. As a corollary to this proposition, the duty of the churches was to define the creed, to set forth the church polity, and to determine the bounds of morality within the state. Two of the colonies held the corollary to be so important that it almost changed places with the proposition when Massachusetts and New Haven became rigid theocracies.[a]
With respect to taxation in the four colonies the statement should be modified, inasmuch as the support of religion was at first voluntary in all four: in Plymouth until 1657, in Massachusetts from 1630 to 1638, in Connecticut before 1640; yet both New Haven and Connecticut accepted the suggestion made by the Commissioners of the United Colonies on September 5, 1644, "that each man should be required to set down what he would voluntarily give for the support of the gospel, and that any man who refused should be rated according to his possessions and compelled to pay" the sum so levied. Since in religious affairs strict conformity was required by the three Puritan colonies, and since the liberty accorded to the few early dissenters in Plymouth was not such as to modify her prevailing polity or worship, these first few years of voluntary assessment do not nullify the dominant truth of the preceding statement.
In the intimate relation of Church and State, the people of these four New England colonies regarded the magistrates as "Nursing Fathers" of the Church, [2l] who were to take "special note and care of every Church and provide and assign allotments of land for the maintenance of each of them." [22] The State, accepting the same view of caretaker, carried its supervision still farther and devised a system for the maintenance of the ministry in accordance with sundry laws made to insure the people's support, respect, and obedience. The churches reciprocated. First of all, they provided their members with the approved and accepted essentials of religious life, and they further exercised a rigorous supervision over the moral welfare of the whole community. Secondly, they aided the State through the influence of their ministers, who, on all important occasions, were expected to meet with the magistrates to consult and advise upon affairs whether spiritual or temporal. But the framers of governments were not satisfied with these measures that aimed to present a strongly established church, capable of extending a fine moral, ethical, and religious influence over the colonists, and also to enforce upon the wayward, the careless, or the indifferent among them its support and their obedience. If these measures provided for the ordinary welfare of the community and for the usual relations b between the ministers and their people, there were still possibilities of factional strife to guard against, and such warfare in that age might or might not confine itself within the limits of theological controversy or within the lines of church organization. Consequently, the better to preserve the churches from schism or corrupting innovations and the commonwealth from discord, the supreme control of the churches was lodged in the General Court of each colony. It could, whenever necessary to secure harmony, whether ecclesiastical or civil, legislate with reference to all or any of the churches within its jurisdiction. Examples of such legislation occur frequently in the religious history of the colonies, especially of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Such interdependence of the spiritual and temporal power practically amounted to a union of Church and State. Indeed, in Massachusetts and New Haven, to be a voter, a man must first be a member of a church of approved standing. In more liberal Plymouth and Connecticut, the franchise, at first, was made to depend only upon conduct, though it was early found necessary to add a property qualification in order to cut off undesirable voters.[23] In the Connecticut colony, it was expressly enacted that church censure should not debar from civil privilege. When advocating this amount of separation between church and civil power, Thomas Hooker was not moved by any such religious principle as influenced the Separatists of Plymouth. On the contrary, it was his political foresight which made him urge upon the colonists a more representative government[c] than would be obtainable from a franchise based upon church-membership where, as in the colonial churches, admission to such membership was conditioned upon exacting tests. The great Connecticut leader was far in advance of the statesmen of his time, for they held that the religion of a prince or government must be the religion of the people; that every subject must be by birthright a member of the national church, to leave which was both heretical and disloyal and should be punished by political and civil disabilities. This union of Church and State was the theory of the age,—a principle of statecraft throughout all of Europe as well as in England. Naturally it emigrated to New England to be a foundation of civil government and a fortress for that type of nonconformity which the colonists chose to transplant and make predominant. The type, as we have seen, was Congregationalism, and the Congregational church became the established church in each of the four colonies.
This theory of Church and State was the cause at bottom of all the early theological dissensions which disturbed the peace and threatened the colony of Massachusetts. Moreover, their settlement offers the most striking contrast between the fundamental theory of Congregationalism and the theory of a union between Church and State. With the power of supervision over the Church lodged in the General Court, whatever the theory of Congregationalism as to the independence of the individual churches, in practice the civil authority disciplined them and their members, and early invaded ecclesiastical territory. In Salem, Endicott took it upon himself to expel Ralph Smith for holding extreme Separatist principles, and shipped the Browns back to England for persisting in the use of the Book of Common Prayer. He considered both parties equally dangerous to the welfare of the community, because, according to the new standard of church-life, both were censurable. Endicott held that to tolerate any measure of diversity in religious practices was to cultivate the ferment of civil disorder. Considering the bitterness, narrowness, intensity, and also the irritating conviction that every one else was heretical and anti-Christian, with which men of that age clung to their religious differences, Endicott had some reason for holding this opinion. The Boston authorities believed in no less drastic measures to maintain the civil peace and consequent good name of the colony. John Davenport of New Haven voiced the Massachusetts sentiment as well as his own in: "Civil government is for the common welfare of all, as well in the Church as without; which will then be most certainly effected, when Public Trust and Power of these matters is committed to such men as are most approved according to God; and these are Church-members."[24] Consequently, the Massachusetts law of 1631 [25] forbade any but church members to become freemen of the colony, and to these only was intrusted any share in its government. A similar law was later formulated for the New Haven colony. John Cotton echoed the further sentiment of a New England community when, writing of the relations between the churches and the magistrates, he defined the church as "subject to the Magistrate in the matters concerning the civil peace, of which there are four sorts:" (1) with reference to men's goods, lives, liberty, and lands; (2) with establishment of religion in doctrine, worship, and government according to the Word of God, as also the reformation of corruption in any of these; (3) with certain public spiritual administrations which may help forward the public good, as fasts and synods; (4) and finally the church must be subject to the magistrates in patient suffering of unjust persecution, since for her to take up the sword in her own defense would only increase the disturbance of the public peace. [26] As a result of such public sentiment, churches were not to be organized without the approval of the magistrates, nor were any "persons being members of any church … gathered without the approbation of the magistrates and the greater part of said churches" (churches of the colony) to be admitted to the freedom of the commonwealth. [27] This law, or its equivalent, with reference to church organization was found upon the statute books of all four colonies.
In a pioneer community and a primitive commonwealth, developing slowly in accord with the new democratic principles underlying both its church and secular life, the "maintenance of the peace and welfare of the churches,"[28] which was intrusted to the care of the General Court, was frequently equivalent to maintaining the civil peace and prosperity of the colony. Endicott's deportation of the Browns and the report of the exclusiveness and exacting tests of membership in the colonial churches had early led the members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, resident in England, to fear that the emigrants had departed from their original intent and purpose. And the colonists began to feel that they were in danger of falling under the displeasure of their king and of their Puritan friends at home. Consequently, there entered into the settling of all later religious differences in the colony the determination to avoid appeals to the home country, and also to avoid any report of disturbance or dissatisfaction that might be prejudicial to her independence, general policy, or commercial prosperity. The recognition of such danger made many persons satisfied to submit to government by an exclusive class, comprising in Massachusetts one tenth of the people and in the New Haven colony one ninth. These alone had any voice in making the laws. In submitting to their dictation, the large majority of the people had to submit to a "government that left no incident, circumstance, or experience of the life of an individual, personal, domestic, social, or civil, still less anything that concerned religion, free from the direct or indirect interposition of public authority." [29] Such inquisitorial supervision was due to the close alliance of Church and State within the narrow limits of a theocracy. In more liberal Plymouth and Connecticut, the "watch and ward" over one's fellows, which the early colonial church insisted upon, was extended only over church members, and even over them was less rigorous, less intrusive. Something of the development of the great authority of the State over the churches and of its attitude and theirs towards synods may be gleaned from the earliest pages of Massachusetts ecclesiastical history. The starting-point of precedent for the elders of the church to be regarded as advisors only and the General Court as authoritative seems to have been in a matter of taxation, when, in February, 1632, the General Court assessed the church in Watertown. The elders advised resistance; the Court compelled payment. In the following July, the Boston church inquired of the churches of Plymouth, Salem, Dorchester, and Watertown, whether a ruling elder could at the same time hold office as a civil magistrate. A correspondence ensued and the answer returned was that he could not. Thereupon, Mr. Nowell resigned his eldership in the Boston church. [30] Winthrop mentions eight[d] important occasions between 1632 and 1635 when the elders, which term included pastors, teachers, and ruling elders, were summoned by the General Court of Massachusetts to give advice upon temporal affairs. In March of 1635-36 the Court "entreated them (the elders) together with the brethren of every church within the jurisdiction, to consult and advise of one uniforme order of discipline in the churches agreable to Scriptures, and then to consider how far the magistrates are bound to interpose for the preservation of that uniformity and peace of the churches." [31] The desire of the Court grew in part out of the influx of new colonists, who did not like the strict church discipline, and in part out of the tangle of Church and State during the Roger Williams controversy. The Court had disciplined Williams as one, who, having no rights in the corporation, had no ground for complaint at the hostile reception of his teachings. These the authorities regarded as harmful to their government and dangerous to religion. His too warm adherents in the Salem church were, however, rightful members of the community, and they had been punished for upholding one whom the General Court, advised by the elders of the churches, had seen fit to censure. Punished thus, ostensibly, for contempt of the magistrates by the refusal to them of the land they claimed as theirs on Marblehead Neck, and feeling that the independence of their church life and their rightful choice in the selection of their pastor had really been infringed, the Salem church sent letters to the elders of all the other churches of the Bay, asking that the magistrates and deputies be admonished for their decision as a "heinous sin." The Court came out victorious, by refusing at its next general session to seat the Salem deputies "until they should give satisfaction by letter" for holding dangerous opinions and for writing "letters of defamation," and by proceeding to banish Roger Williams. Before the session of the Court, the elders of the Massachusetts churches, jointly and individually, labored with the Salem people and brought the majority to a conviction of their error in supporting Roger Williams. [e]
The platform of church discipline which the Court advised in 1635-36 was not forthcoming, and the matter was allowed to rest.[f] In 1637, with the consent of the General Court, a synod of elders and lay delegates from all the New England churches was called to harmonize the discordant factions created by the heated Antinomian controversy. During the synod, the magistrates were present all the time as hearers, and even as speakers, but not as members. The dangerous schism was ended more by the Court's banishment of Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson, together with their more prominent followers, than by the work of the synod. However, Governor Winthrop was so delighted with the conferences of the synod that, in his enthusiasm, he suggested that it would be fit "to have the like meeting once a year, or at least the next year, to settle what yet remained to be agreed, or if but to nourish love."[32] But his suggestion was voted down, for the Synod of 1637 was considered by some to be "a perilous deflection from the theory of Congregationalism."[33] Even the fortnightly meeting of ministers who resided near each other, and which it had become a custom to call for friendly conference, was looked at askance by those[g] who feared in it the germ of some authoritative body that should come to exercise control over the individual churches. When this custom was endorsed and permitted in the "Body of Liberties," in 1641, the assurance that these meetings "were only by way of Brotherly conference and consultation" was felt to be necessary to appease the opposition. When, two and four years later, Anabaptist converts and a flood of Presbyterian literature called for measures of repression, and the Court summoned councils to consult upon a course of action, it was most careful in each case to reassert the doctrine of the complete independence of the individual church. Synods, from the purely Congregational standpoint, were to be called only upon the initiative of the churches, and were authoritative bodies, composed of both ministerial and lay delegates from such churches, and their duty was to confer and advise upon matters of general interest or upon special problems. In cases where their decisions were unheeded, they could enforce their displeasure at the contumacious church only by cutting it off from fellowship. Consequently, though there was some opposition to the Court's calling of synods and a resultant general restlessness, there was none when the Court confined its supervision and commands to individually schismatic churches or to unruly members. The time had not yet come for the recognition of what this double system of church government—government by its members, supervision by the Court —foreboded. The colonists did not see that within it was the embryo of an authoritative body exercising some of the powers of the Presbyterian General Assembly. The supervising body might be composed of laymen acting in their capacity as members of the General Court, but the powers they exercised were none the less akin to the very ones that Congregationalism had declared to be heretical and anti-Christian. Moreover, the tendency was toward an increase of this authoritative power every time it was exercised and each time that the colonists submitted to its dictation.
Of the two colonies founded after Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, the latter preserved the complete independence of her original church until the admission of the shore towns[h] to her jurisdiction, when she instituted that friendly oversight of the churches which had begun to prevail elsewhere. Thereafter her General Court kept a rigorous oversight over the purity of her churches and the conduct of their members. The General Court of Connecticut early compelled a recognition of its authority over the religious life of the people and its right of special legislation.[j] For example, in 1643, the Court demanded of the Wethersfield church a list of the grievances which disturbed it. In the next year, when Matthew Allyn petitioned for an order to the Hartford church, commanding the reconsideration of its sentence of excommunication against him, the Court "adjudged his plea an accusation upon the church" which he was bound to prove. These incidents from early colonial history in some measure illustrate the practical working of the theory of Church and State. The conviction that the State should support one form of religion, and only one, was ever present to the colonial mind. If confirmation of its worth were needed, one had only to glance at the turmoil of the Rhode Island colony experimenting with religious liberty and a complete separation of Church and State. Like all pioneers and reformers, she had gathered elements hard to control, and would-be citizens neither peaceable nor reasonable in their interpretation of the new range of freedom. Watching Rhode Island, the Congregational men of New England hugged more tightly the conviction that their method was best, and that any variation from it would work havoc. It was this theory and this conviction, ever present in their minds, that underlay all ecclesiastical laws, all special legislation with reference to churches, to their members, or to public fasts and thanksgivings. This deep-rooted conviction created hatred toward and fear of all schismatical doctrines, enmity toward all dissenting sects, and opposition to any tolerance of them.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] "The one prime, all essential, and sufficient qualiiy of a theocracy … adopted as the form of an earthly government, was that the civil power should be guided in its exercise by religion and religious ordinances."—G. E. Ellis, Puritan Age in Massachusetts, p. 188.
"Noe man shal be admitted to the freedome of this body politicke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same."—Mass. Col. Rec. i, 87, under date of May 28, 1631.
"Church members onely shall be free burgesses and they onely shall chuse magistrates and officers among themselves to haue the power of transacting in all publique and ciuill affayres of this plantatio."—New Haven Col. Rec. i, 15; also ii, 115, 116.
The governments of Massachusetts and New Haven "never absolutely merged church and state." The franchise depended on church-membership, but the voter, exercising his right in directing the affairs of the colony, was speaking, "not as the church but as the civil Court of Legislation and adjudication."—W. Walker, History of the Congregational Churches, p. 123.
Yet it was due to this merging and this dependence that on October 25, 1639, there were only sixteen free burgesses or voters out of one hundred and forty-four planters in the New Haven Colony.—See N. H. Col. Rec. i, 20.
"Theoretically Church and State (in Connecticut) were separated: practically they were so interwoven that separation would have meant the severance of soul and body."—C. M. Andrews, Three River Towns of Conn. p. 22.
[c] To John Cotton's "democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain, as a fit government for church or commonwealth," and to Gov. Winthrop's objections to committing matters to the judgment of the body of the people because "safety lies in the councils of the best part which is always the least, and of the best part, the wiser is always the lesser," Hooker replied that "in all matters which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact the business which concerns all, I conceive under favor, most suitable to rule and most safe for the relief of the whole."—Hutchinson, Hist. of Mass. i, App. iii.
[d] (1) To adjust a difference between Governor Winthrop and Deputy Dudley in 1632; (2) about building a fort at Nantasket, February, 1632; (3) in regard to the settlement of the Rev. John Cotton, September, 1633; (4) in consultation concerning Roger Williams's denial of the patent, January, 1634; (5) concerning rights of trade at Kennebec, July, 1634; (6) in regard to the fort on Castle Island, August, 1634; (7) concerning the rumor in 1635 of the coming of a Governor-General; and (8) in the case of Mr. Nowell.—Winthrop, i, pp. 89, 99, 112, 122, 136-137, 159-181.
[e] Roger Williams was the real author of the letters which the Salem church was required to disclaim.
[f] Upon a further suggestion from the General Court, John Cotton prepared a catechism entitled, Milk for Babes.
[g] Governor Winthrop replied to Dr. Skelton's objections that "no church or person could have authority over another church."—See H. M. Dexter, Ecclesiastical Councils of New England, p. 31; Winthrop, i. p. 139.
[h] Guilford, Branford, Milford, Stamford, on the mainland, and Southold, on Long Island.
The General Court was head of the churches. "It was more than Pope, or Pope and College of Cardinals, for it exercised all authority, civil and ecclesiastical. In matters of discipline, faith, and practice there was no appeal from its decisions. Except the right to be protected in their orthodoxy the churches had no privileges which the Court did not confer, or could not take away."—Bronson's Early Gov't. in Conn. p. 347, in N. H. Hist. Soc. Papers, vol. iii.
[j] On August 18, 1658, the court refused, upon complaint of the Wethersfield church, to remove Mr. Russell. In March, 1661, after duly considering the matter, the court allowed Mr. Stow to sever his connection with the church of Middletown. It concerned itself with the strife in the Windsor church over an assistant pastor from 1667 to 1680. It allowed the settlement of Woodbury in 1672 because of dissatisfaction with the Stratford church. It permitted Stratford to divide in 1669. These are but a few instances both of the authority of the General Court over individual churches and of that discord which, finding its strongest expression in the troubles of the Hartford church, not only rent the churches of Connecticut from 1650 to 1670, but "insinuated itself into all the affairs of the society, towns, and the whole community." Another illustration of the court's oversight of the purity of religion was its investigation in 1670 into the "soundness of the minister at Rye." For these and hosts of similar examples see index Conn. Col. Rec. vols. i, ii, iii, and iv.
CHAPTER IV
THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM AND THE HALF-WAY COVENANT
It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.—Sydney Smith.
In each of the New England colonies under consideration, the settlers organized their church system and established its relation to the State, expecting that the strong arm of the temporal power would insure stability and harmony in both religious and civil life. As we know, they were speedily doomed to disappointment. As we have seen, they failed to estimate the influences of the new land, where freedom from the restraint of an older civilization bred new ideas and estimates of the liberty that should be accorded men. Within the first decade Massachusetts had great difficulty in impressing religious uniformity upon her rapidly increasing and heterogeneous population. She found coercion difficult, costly, dangerous to her peace, and to her reputation when the oppressed found favorable ears in England to listen to their woes. Ecclesiastical differences of less magnitude, contemporary in time and foreshadowing discontent and opposition to the established order of Church and State, were settled in more quiet ways. John Davenport, after witnessing the Antinomian controversy, declined the pressing hospitality of Massachusetts, and led his New Haven company far enough afield to avoid theological entanglements or disputed points of church polity. Unimpeded, they would make their intended experiment in statecraft and build their strictly scriptural republic. Still earlier Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and John Warham led the Connecticut colonists into the wilderness because they foresaw contention, strife, and evil days before them if they were to be forced to conform to the strict policy of Massachusetts.[a] They preferred, unhindered, to plant and water the young vine of a more democratic commonwealth. And even as Massachusetts met with large troubles of her own, so smaller ones beset these other colonies in their endeavor to preserve uniformity of religious faith and practice. Until 1656, outside of Massachusetts, sectarianism barely lifted its head. Religious contumacy was due to varying opinions as to what should be the rule of the churches and the privileges of their members. As the churches held theoretically that each was a complete, independent, and self-governing unit, their practice and teaching concerning their powers and duties began to show considerable variation. Such variation was unsatisfactory, and so decidedly so that the leaders of opinion in the four colonies early began to feel the need of some common platform, some authoritative standard of church government, such as was agreed upon later in the Cambridge Platform of 1648 and in the Half-Way Covenant, a still later exposition or modification of certain points in the Platform.
The need for the Platform arose, also, from two other causes: one purely colonial, and the other Anglo-colonial. The first was, since everybody had to attend public worship, the presence in the congregations of outsiders as distinct from church members. These outsiders demanded broader terms of admission to holy privileges and comforts. The second cause, Anglo-colonial in nature, arose from the inter-communion of colonial and English Puritan churches and from the strength of the politico-ecclesiastical parties in England. Whatever the outcome there, the consequences to colonial life of the rapidly approaching climax in England, when, as we now know, King was to give way to Commonwealth and Presbyterianism find itself subordinate to Independency, would be tremendous.
In the first twenty years of colonial life, great changes had come over New England. Many men of honest and Christian character—"sober persons who professed themselves desirous of renewing their baptismal covenant, and submit unto church discipline, but who were unable to come up to that experimental account of their own regeneration which would sufficiently embolden their access to the other sacrament" (communion) [34]—felt that the early church regulations, possible only in small communities where each man knew his fellow, had been outgrown, and that their retention favored the growth of hypocrisy. The exacting oversight of the churches in their "watch and ward" over their members was unwelcome, and would not be submitted to by many strangers who were flocking into the colonies. The "experimental account" of religion demanded, as of old, a public declaration or confession of the manner in which conviction of sinfulness had come to each one; of the desire to put evil aside and to live in accordance with God's commands as expressed in Scripture and through the church to which the repentant one promised obedience. This public confession was a fundamental of Congregationalism. Other religious bodies have copied it; but at the birth of Congregationalism, and for centuries afterwards, the bulk of European churches, like the Protestant Episcopal Church to-day, regarded "Christian piety more as a habit of life, formed under the training of childhood, and less as a marked spiritual change in experience." [35]
It followed that while many of the newcomers in the colonies were indifferent to religion, by far the larger number were not, and thought that, as they had been members of the English Established Church, they ought to be admitted into full membership in the churches of England's colonies. They felt, moreover, that the religious training of their children was being neglected because the New England churches ignored the child whose parents would not, or could not, submit to their terms of membership. Still more strongly did these people feel neglected and dissatisfied when, as the years went by, more and more of them were emigrants who had been acceptable members of the Puritan churches in England. They continued to be refused religious privileges because New England Congregationalism doubted the scriptural validity of letters of dismissal from churches where the discipline and church order varied from its own. Within the membership of the New England churches themselves, there was great uncertainty concerning several church privileges, as, for instance, how far infant baptism carried with it participation in church sacraments, and whether adults, baptized in infancy, who had failed to unite with the church by signing the Covenant, could have their children baptized into the church. Considerations of church-membership and baptism, for which the Cambridge Synod of 1648 was summoned, were destined, because of political events in England, to be thrust aside and to wait another eight years for their solution in that conference which framed the Half-Way Covenant as supplementary to the Cambridge Platform of faith and discipline.
What has been termed the Anglo-colonial cause for summoning the Cambridge Synod finds explanation in the frequent questions and demands which English Independency put to the New England churches concerning church usage and discipline, and in the intense interest with which New England waited the outcome of the constitutional struggle in England between King and Parliament.
When the great controversy broke out in England between Presbyterians and Independents, the fortunes of Massachusetts (who felt every wave of the struggle) and of New England were in the balance. Presbyterians in England proclaimed the doctrine of church unity, and of coercion if necessary, to procure it; the Independents, the doctrine of toleration. Puritans, inclining to Presbyterianism, were disturbed over reports from the colonies, and letters of inquiry were sent and answers returned explaining that, while the internal polity of the New England churches was not far removed from Presbyterianism, they differed widely from the Presbyterian standard as to a national church and as to the power of synods over churches, and that they also held to a much larger liberty in the right of each church to appoint its officers and control its own internal affairs. At the opening of the Long Parliament (1640-1644), many emigrants had returned to England from the colonies, and, under the leadership of the influential Hugh Peters, had given such an impetus to English thought that the Independent party rose to political importance and made popular the "New England Way." The success of the Independents brought relief to Massachusetts, yet it was tinctured with apprehension lest "toleration" should be imposed upon her. The signing of the "League and Covenant" with England in 1643 by Scotland, the oath of the Commons to support it, and the pledge "to bring the churches of God in the three Kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of church government and catechizing" (including punishment of malignants and opponents of reformation in Church and State), carried menace to the colonies and to Massachusetts in particular. The supremacy of Scotch or English Nonconformity meant a severity toward any variation from its Presbyterianism as great as Laud had exercised.[c]
In 1643 Parliament convened one hundred and fifty members[d] in the Westminster Assembly to plan the reform of the Church of England. Their business was to formulate a Confession which should dictate to all Englishmen what they should believe and how express it, and should also define a Church, which, preserving the inherent English idea of its relation to the State, should bear a close likeness to the Reformed churches of the Continent and yet approach as nearly as possible both to the then Church of Scotland and to the English Church of the time of Elizabeth. The work of this assembly, known as the Westminster Confession, demonstrated to the New England colonists the weakness of their church system and the need among them of religious unity.[e]
Many among the colonists doubted the advisability of a church platform, considering it permissible as a declaration of faith, but of doubtful value if its articles were to be authoritative as a binding rule of faith and practice without "adding, altering, or omitting." Men of this mind waited for controversial writings,[f] to clear up misconception and misrepresentation in England, but they waited in vain. Moreover, the Puritan Board of Commissioners for Plantations of 1643 threatened as close an oversight and as rigid control of colonial affairs from a Presbyterian Parliament as had been feared from the King. Furthermore, a Presbyterian cabal in Plymouth and Massachusetts, 1644-1646, gathered to it the discontent of large numbers of unfranchised residents within the latter colony, and under threat of an appeal to Parliament boldly asked for the ballot and for church privileges. In view of these developments, nearly all the colonial churches, though with some hesitation, united in the Synod of Cambridge, which was originally called for the year 1646.
In the calling of the synod Massachusetts took the lead. Several years before, in 1643, the four colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven had united in the New England Confederacy, or "Confederacy of the United Colonies," for mutual advantage in resisting the encroachments of the Dutch, French, and Indians, and for "preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the gospel." In the confederacy, Massachusetts and Connecticut soon became the leaders. Considering how much more strongly the former felt the pulsations of English political life, and how active were the Massachusetts divines as expositors of the "New England way of the churches," the Bay Colony naturally took the initiative in calling the Cambridge Synod. But mindful of the opposition to her previous autocratic summons, her General Court framed its call as a "desire" that ministerial, together with lay delegates, from all the churches of New England should meet at Cambridge. There, representing the churches, and in accordance with the earliest teachings of Congregationalism, they were to meet in synod "for sisterly advice and counsel." They were to formulate the practice of the churches in regard to baptism and adult privileges, and to do so "for the confirming of the weak among ourselves and the stopping of the mouths of our adversaries abroad." During the two years of unavoidable delay before the synod met in final session, these topics, which were expected to be foremost in the conference, were constantly in the public mind. Through this wide discussion, the long delay brought much good. It brought also misfortune in the death of Thomas Hooker in 1647, and by it loss of one of the great lights and most liberal minds in the proposed conference. Nearly all the colonial churches[g] were represented in the synod. When, during its session, news was received that Cromwell was supreme in England, its members turned from the discussion of baptism and church-membership to a consideration of what should be the constitution of the churches. The supremacy of Cromwell and of the Independents who filled his armies cleared the political background. All danger of enforced Presbyterianism was over. The strength of the Presbyterian malcontents, who had sought to bring Massachusetts and New England into disrepute in England, was broken. Since the colonists were free to order their religious life as they pleased, the Cambridge Synod turned aside from its purposed task to formulate a larger platform of faith and polity.
When the Cambridge Synod adjourned, the orthodoxy of the New England churches could not be impugned. In all matters of faith "for the substance thereof" they accepted the Westminster Confession of Faith, but from its measures of government and discipline they differed.[h] This Cambridge Platform was more important as recognizing the independence of the churches and the authority of custom among them than as formulating a creed. It governed the New England churches for sixty years, or until Massachusetts and Connecticut Congregationalism came to the parting of the way, whence one was to develop its associated system of church government, and the other its consociated system as set forth in the Saybrook Platform, formulated at Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1708. Meanwhile, the Cambridge Platform gave all the New England churches a standard by which to regulate their practice and to resist change.[j]
A study of the Platform yields the following brief summary of its cardinal points:—
(a) The Congregational church is not "National, Provincial or Classical,"[k] but is a church of a covenanted brotherhood, wherein each member makes public acknowledgment of spiritual regeneration and declares his purpose to submit himself to the ordinances of God and of his church.[l] A slight concession was made to the liberal church party and to the popular demand for broader terms of membership in the provision for those of "the weakest measure of faith," and in the substitution of a written account of their Christian experience by those who were ill or timid. This written "experimental account" was to be read to the church by one of the elders. In the words of the Platform, "Such charity and tenderness is to be used, as the weakest Christian if sincere, may not be excluded or discouraged. Severity of examination is to be avoided."[m]
(b) The officers of the church are elders and deacons, the former including, as of old, pastors, teachers, and ruling elders. That the authority within the church had passed from the unrestrained democracy of the early Plymouth Separatists to a silent democracy before the command of a speaking aristocracy[n] is witnessed to by the Platform's declaration that "power of office" is proper to the elders, while "power of privilege"[o] belongs to the brethren. In other words, the brethren or membership have a "second" and "indirect power," according to which they are privileged to elect their elders. Thereafter those officers possess the "direct power," or authority, to govern the church as they see fit.[p] In the matter of admission, dismission, censure, excommunication, or re-admission of members, the brotherhood of the church may express their opinion by vote.[q] In cases of censure and excommunication, the Platform specifies that the offender could be made to suffer only through deprivation of his church rights and not through any loss of his civil ones.[r] In the discussion of this point, the more liberal policy of Connecticut and Plymouth prevailed.
(c) In regard to pastors and teachers, the Platform affirms that they are such only by the right of election and remain such only so long as they preside over the church by which they were elected.
Their ordination after election, as well as that of the ruling elders and deacons, is to be by the laying on of hands of the elders of the church electing them. In default of elders, this ordination is to be by the hands of brethren whom because of their exemplary lives the church shall choose to perform the rite.[t]
A new provision was also made, one leaning toward Presbyterianism, whereby elders of other churches could perform this ceremony, "when there were no elders and the church so desired."
(d) Church maintenance, amounting to a church tax, was insisted upon not only from church-members but from all, since "all that are taught in the word, are to contribute unto him that teacheth." If necessary, because corrupt men creep into the congregations and church contributions cannot be collected, the magistrate is to see to it that the church does not suffer.
(e) The Platform defined the intercommunion of the churches[v] upon such broad lines as to admit of sympathetic fellowship even when slight differences existed in local customs. In so important a matter as when an offending elder was to be removed, consultation with other churches was commanded before action should be taken against him. The intercommunion of churches was defined as of various kinds: as for mutual welfare; for sisterly advice and consultation, in cases of public offense, where the offending church was unconscious of fault; for recommendation of members going from one church to another; for need, relief, or succor of unfortunate churches; and "by way of propagation," when over-populous churches were to be divided.
(f) Concerning synods,[w] the Platform asserts that they are "necessary to the well-being of churches for the establishment of truth and peace therein;" that they are to consist of elders, or ministerial delegates, and also of lay delegates, or "messengers;" that their function is to determine controversies over questions of faith, to debate matters of general interest, to guide and to express judgment upon churches, "rent by discord or lying under open scandal." Synods could be called by the churches, and also by the magistrates through an order to the churches to send their elders and messengers, but they were not to be permanent bodies. On the contrary, unlike the synods of the Presbyterian system, they were to be disbanded when the work of the special session for which they were summoned was finished. Moreover, they were not "to exercise church censure in the way of discipline nor any other act of authority or jurisdiction;" yet their judgments were to be received, "so far as consonant to the word of God," since they were judged to be an ordinance of God appointed in his Word.
(g) The Platform's section "Of the Civil Magistrate in matters Ecclesiastical"[x] maintains that magistrates cannot compel subjects to become church-members; that they ought not to meddle with the proper work of officers of the churches, but that they ought to see to it that godliness is upheld, and the decrees of the church obeyed. To accomplish these ends, they should exert all the civil authority intrusted to them, and their foremost duty was to put down blasphemy, idolatry, and heresy. In any question as to what constituted the last, the magistrates assisted by the elders were to decide and to determine the measure of the crime. They were to punish the heretic, not as one who errs in an intellectual judgment, but as a moral leper and for whose evil influence the community was responsible to God. The civil magistrates were also to punish all profaners of the Sabbath, all contemners of the ministry, all disturbers of public worship, and to proceed "against schismatic or obstinately corrupt churches."
These seven points summarize the important work of the Cambridge Synod and the Platform wherein it embodied the church usage and fixed the ecclesiastical customs of New England. Concerning its own work, the Synod remarked in conclusion that it "hopes that this will be a proof to the churches beyond the seas that the New England churches are free from heresies and from the character of schism," and that "in the doctrinal part of religion they have agreed entirely with the Reformed churches of England." [36]
Let us in a few sentences review the whole story thus far of colonial Congregationalism. With the exception of the churches of Plymouth and Watertown, the colonists had come to America without any definite religious organization. True, they had in their minds the example of the Reformed churches on the Continent, and much of theory, and many convictions as to what ought to be the rule of churches. These theories and these convictions soon crystallized out. And the transatlantic crystallization was found to yield results, some of which were very similar to the modifications which time had wrought in England upon the rough and embryonic forms of Congregationalism as set forth by Robert Browne and Henry Barrowe. The characteristics of Congregationalism during its first quarter of a century upon New England soil were: the clearly defined independence or self-government of the local churches; the fellowship of the churches; the development of large and authoritative powers in the eldership; a more exact definition of the functions of synods, a definite limitation of their authority; and, finally, a recognition of the authority of the civil magistrates in religious affairs generally, and of their control in special cases arising within individual churches. In the growing power of the eldership, and in the provision of the Platform which permits ordination by the hands of elders of other churches, when a church had no elders and its members so desired, there is a trend toward the polity of the Presbyterian system. In the Platform's definition of the power of the magistrates over the religious life of the community, there is evident the colonists' conviction that, notwithstanding the vaunted independence of the churches, there ought to be some strong external authority to uphold them and their discipline; some power to fall back upon, greater than the censure of a single church or the combined strength and influence derived from advisory councils and unauthoritative synods. In Connecticut, this control by the civil power was to increase side by side with the tendency to rely upon advisory councils. From this twofold development during a period of sixty years, there arose the rigid autonomy of the later Saybrook system of church-government, wherein the civil authority surrendered to ecclesiastical courts its supreme control of the churches.
Turning from the text of the Cambridge Platform to its application, we find among the earliest churches "rent by discord," schismatically corrupt, and to be disciplined according to its provisions, that of Hartford, Connecticut. From the earliest years of the Connecticut colony there had been within it a large party, constantly increasing, who, because they were unhappy and aggrieved at having themselves and their children shut out of the churches, had advocated admitting all of moral life to the communion table. The influence of Thomas Hooker kept the discontent within bounds until his death in 1647, the year before the Cambridge Synod met. Thereafter, the conservative and liberal factions in many of the churches came quickly into open conflict. The Hartford church in particular became rent by dissension so great that neither the counsel of neighboring churches nor the commands of the General Court, legislating in the manner prescribed by the Cambridge instrument, could heal the schism. The trouble in the Hartford church arose because of a difference between Mr. Stone, the minister, and Elder Goodwin, who led the minority in their preference for a candidate to assist their pastor. Before the discovery of documents relating to the controversy, it was the custom of earlier historians to refer the dispute to political motives. But this church feud, and the discussion which it created throughout Connecticut, was purely religious, and had to do with matters of church privileges and eventually with rights of baptism.[y] The conflict originated through Mr. Stone's conception of his ministerial authority, which belonged rather to the period of his English training and which was concisely set forth by his oft-quoted definition of the rule of the elders as "a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy."[z] Mr. Stone and Elder Goodwin, the two chief officers in the Hartford church, each commanded an influential following. Personal and political affiliations added to the bitterness of party bias in the dispute which raged over the following three questions: (a) What were the rights of the minority in the election of a minister whom they were obliged to support? (b) What was the proper mode of ecclesiastical redress if these rights were ignored? (c) What were those baptismal rights and privileges which the Cambridge Platform had not definitely settled? The discussion of the first two questions precipitated into the foreground the still unanswered third. The turmoil in the Hartford church continued for years and was provocative of disturbances throughout the colony. Accordingly, in May, 1656, a petition was presented to the General Court by persons unknown, asking for broader baptismal privileges. Moved by the appeal, the Court appointed a committee, consisting of the governor, lieutenant-governor and two deputies, to consult with the elders of the churches and to draw up a series of questions embodying the grievances which were complained of throughout the colony as well as in the Hartford church. The Court further commanded that a copy of these questions be sent to the General Courts of the other three colonies, that they might consider them and advise Connecticut as to some method of putting an end to ecclesiastical disputes. As Connecticut was not the only colony having trouble of this sort, Massachusetts promptly ordered thirteen of her elders to meet at Boston during the following summer, and expressed a desire for the cooperation of the churches of the confederated colonies. Plymouth did not respond. New Haven rejected the proposed conference. She feared that it would result in too great changes in church discipline and, consequently, in her civil order,—changes which she believed would endanger the peace and purity of her churches;[aa] yet she sent an exposition, written by John Davenport, of the questions to be discussed. The Connecticut General Court, glad of Massachusetts' appreciative sympathy, appointed delegates, advising them to first take counsel together concerning the questions to be considered at Boston, and ordered them upon their return to report to the Court.
The two questions which since the summoning of the Cambridge Synod had been under discussion throughout all New England were the right of non-covenanting parishioners in the choice of a minister, and the rights of children of baptized parents, that had not been admitted to full membership. These were the main topics of discussion in the Synod, or, more properly, Ministerial Convention, of 1657, which assembled in Boston, and which decreed the Half-Way Covenant. The Assembly decided in regard to baptism that persons, who had been baptized in their infancy, but who, upon arriving at maturity, had not publicly professed their conversion and united in full membership with the church, were not fit to receive the Lord's Supper:—
Yet in case they understood the Grounds of Religion and are not scandalous, and solemnly own the Covenant in their own persons,[ab] wherein they give themselves and their own children unto the Lord, and desire baptism for them, we (with due reverence to any Godly Learned that may dissent) see not sufficient cause to deny Baptism unto their children. [37]
Church care and oversight were to be extended to such children. But in order to go to communion, or to vote in church affairs, the old personal, public profession that for so many years had been indispensable to "signing the covenant" was retained [38] and must still be given.
This Half-Way Covenant, as it came to be called, enlarged the terms of baptism and of admission to church privileges as they had been set forth in the Cambridge Platform. The new measure held within itself a contradiction to the foundation principle of Congregationalism. A dual membership was introduced by this attempt to harmonize the Old Testament promise, that God's covenant was with Abraham and his seed forever, with the Congregational type of church which the New Testament was believed to set forth. The former theory must imply some measure of true faith in the children of baptized parents, whether or no they had fulfilled their duty by making public profession and by uniting with the church. This duty was so much a matter of course with the first colonists, and so deeply ingrained was their loyalty to the faith and practice which one generation inherited from another, that it never occurred to them that future descendants of theirs might view differently these obligations of church membership. But a difficulty arose later when the adult obligation implied by baptism in infancy ceased to be met, and when the question had to be settled of how far the parents' measure of faith carried grace with it. Did the inheritance of faith, of which baptism was the sign and seal, stop with the children, or with the grandchildren, or where? To push the theory of inherited rights would result eventually in destroying the covenant church, bringing in its stead a national church of mixed membership; to press the original requirements of the covenant upon an unwilling people would lessen the membership of the churches, expose them to hostile attack, and to possible overthrow. The colonists compromised upon this dual membership of the Half-Way Covenant. As its full significance did not become apparent for years, the work of the Synod of 1657 was generally acceptable to the ministry, but it met with opposition among the older laity. It was welcomed in Connecticut, where Henry Smith of Wethersfield as early as 1647, Samuel Stone of Hartford, after 1650, and John Warham of Windsor, had been earnest advocates of its enlarged terms. As early as in his draft of the Cambridge Platform, Ralph Partridge of Duxbury in Plymouth colony had incorporated similar changes, and even then they had been seconded by Richard Mather.[ac] They had been omitted from the final draft of that Platform because of the opposition of a small but influential group led by the Rev. Charles Chauncey. As early as 1650, it had become evident that public opinion was favorable to such a change, and that some church would soon begin to put in practice a theory which was held by so many leading divines. Though the Half-Way Covenant was strenuously opposed by the New Haven colony as a whole, Peter Prudden, its second ablest minister, had, as early as 1651, avowed his earnest support of such a measure.
The Half-Way Covenant was presented to the Connecticut General Court, August, 1657. Orders were at once given that copies of it should be distributed to all the churches with a request for a statement of any exceptions that any of them might have to it. None are known to have been returned. This was not due to any great unanimity of sentiment among the churches, for in Connecticut, as elsewhere, many of the older church-members were not so liberally inclined as their ministers, and were loth to follow their lead in this new departure. But when controversy broke out again in the Hartford church, in 1666, because of the baptism of some children, it was found that in the interval of eleven years those who favored the Half-Way covenant had increased in numbers in the church,[ad] and were rapidly gaining throughout the colony, especially in its northern half. By the absorption of the New Haven Colony, its southern boundary in 1664 had become the shore of Long Island Sound.
Though public opinion favored the Half-Way Covenant, the practice of the churches was controlled by their exclusive membership, and, unless a majority thereof approved the new way, there was nothing to compel the church to broaden its baptismal privileges.[ae] This difference between public opinion and church practice, between the congregations and the coterie of church members, was provocative of clashing interests and of factional strife. For several years these factional differences were held in check and made subordinate to the urgent political situation which the restoration of the Stuarts had precipitated, and which demanded harmonious action among the colonists. A royal charter had to be obtained, and when obtained, it gave Connecticut dominion over the New Haven colony. The lower colony had to be reconciled to its loss of independence, in so much as the governing party, with its influential following of conservatives, objected to the consolidation. The liberals, a much larger party numerically, preferred to come under the authority of Connecticut and to enjoy her less restrictive church policy and her broader political life. Matters were finally adjusted, and delegates from the old New Haven colony first took their seats as members of the General Court of Connecticut at the spring session of 1665. Thereafter, in Connecticut history, especially its religious history, the strain of liberalism most often follows the old lines of the Connecticut colony, while that of conservatism is more often met with as reflecting the opinions of those within the former boundaries of that of New Haven.
It was in the year following the union of the two colonies that the quarrel in the Hartford church broke out afresh. The fall preceding the consolidation of the colonies, an appeal was made to the Connecticut General Court which helped to swell the dissatisfaction in the Hartford church and to bring it to the bursting point. In October, 1664, William Pitkin, by birth a member of the English Established Church[af] and a man much esteemed in the colony, as shown, politically, by his office of attorney,[39] and socially by his marriage with Elder Goodwin's daughter, petitioned the General Court in behalf of himself and six associates that it—
would take into serious consideration our present state in this respect that wee are thus as sheep scattered haveing no shepheard, and compare it with what wee conceive you can not but know both God and our King would have it different from what it now is. And take some speedy and effectual course of redress herein, And put us in full and free capacity of injoying those forementioned Advantages which to us as members of Christ's visible Church doe of right belong. By establishing some wholesome Law in this Corporation by vertue whereof wee may both clame and receive of such officers as are, or shall be by Law set over us in the Church or churches where wee have our abode or residence those forementioned privileges and advantages.
Further wee humbly request that for the future no Law in this corporation may be of any force to make us pay or contribute to the maintenance of any Minister or officer in the Church that will neglect or refuse to baptize our Children, and to take charge of us as of such members of the Church as are under his or their charge and care—
Signed—
Admitted freeman
Oct. 9th, 1662, Hartford, Wm. Pitkin.
Admitted freeman
May 21, 1657, Windsor, Michael Humphrey.
Admitted freeman
May 18, 1654, Hartford, John Stedman.
Windsor, James Eno.
Admitted freeman
May 20, 1658, — Robart Reeve.
Windsor, John Morse.
Admitted freeman
May 20, 1658, Windsor, Jonas Westover. [40]
Eno and Humphrey had been complained of because their insistence upon what they considered their rights had caused disturbance in the Windsor church. Now, with the other petitioners, they based their appeal in part upon the King's Letter to the Bay Colony of June 26th, 1662, wherein Charles commanded that "all persons of good and honest lives and conversation be admitted to the sacrament of the Lord's supper, according to the said book of common prayer, and their children to baptism."
This petition of Pitkin and his associates was the first notable expression of dissatisfaction with the Congregationalism of Connecticut. Several Episcopal writers have quoted it as the first appeal of Churchmen in Connecticut. In itself, it forbids such construction. The petitioners had come from England and from the church of the Commonwealth. They were asking either for toleration in the spirit of the Half-Way Covenant or for some special legislation in their behalf. Further, they were demanding religious care and baptism for their children from a clergy who, from the point of view of any strict Episcopalian, had no right to officiate; and, again, it was nearly ten years before the first Church-of-England men found their way to Stratford.[41]
The Court made reply to Pitkin's petition by sending to all the churches a request that they consider—
whither it be not their duty to entertaine all such persons, who are of honest and godly conuersation, hauing a competency of knowledge in the principles of religion, and shall desire to joyne with them in church fellowship, by an explicitt couenant, and that they haue their children baptized, and that all the children of the church be accepted and acco'td reall members of the church and that the church exercise a due Christian care and watch ouer them; and that when they are grown up, being examined by the officer in the presence of the church, it appeares in the judgment of charity, they are duly qualified to participate in the great ordinance of the Lord's Supper, by their being able to examine and discerne the Lord's body, such persons be admitted to full comunion.
The Court desires y't the seuerall officers of y'e respectiue churches, would be pleased to consider whither it be the duty of the Court to order churches to practice according to the premises, if they doe not practice without such an order.[42]
The issue was now fairly before the churches of the colony. The delegates of the people had expressed the opinion of the majority. The Court had invited the expression of any dissent that might exist, yet, despite the invitation, it had issued almost an order to the churches to practice the Half-Way Covenant, and with large interpretation, applying it, not only to the baptism of children who had been born of parents baptized in the colonial church, but also to those whose parents had been baptized in the English communion, at least during the Commonwealth.[ag] Pitkin at once proceeded in behalf of himself and several of his companions to apply for "communion with the church of Hartford in all the ordinances of Christ." [43] This the church refused, and wrought its factions up to white heat over the baptism of some child or children of non-communicants. The storm broke. Other churches felt its effects. Windsor church was rent by faction, Stratford was in turmoil over the Half-Way Covenant, and other churches were divided.
Some means had to be found to put an end to the increasing disorder. Accordingly the Court in October, 1666, commanded the presence of all the preaching elders and ministers within the colony at a synod to find "some way or means to bring those ecclesiastical matters that are in difference in the severall Plantations to an issue." The Court felt obliged to change the name of the appointed meeting from "synod" to "assembly" to avoid the jealousy of the churches. They were afraid that the civil power would overstep its authority, and by calling a synod, composed of elders only, establish a precedent for the exclusion of lay delegates from such bodies. Before this "assembly" could meet, it was shorn of influence through the politics of the conservative Hartford faction, who succeeded in passing a bill at the session of the Commissioners of the United Colonies, which read:—
That in matters of common concern of faith or order necessitating a Synod, it should be a Synod composed of messengers from all the colonies. [44]
Accordingly, Connecticut's next step was to invite Massachusetts to join in a synod to debate seventeen questions of which several had been submitted to the Synod of 1657, and had remained unanswered. Among them were the questions of the right to vote in the choice of minister; of minority rights; and where to appeal in cases of censure believed to be unmerited.[ah]
Massachusetts courteously replied that the questions would be considered if submitted in writing; but she was at heart so indifferent that negotiations for a colonial synod lapsed, and Connecticut was left to adjust the differences in her churches. Consequently, in May, 1668, the Court,—
for promoting and establishing peace in the churches and plantations because of various apprehensions in matters of discipline respecting membership and baptism,—
appointed a committee of influential men in the colony to search out the rules for discipline and see how far persons of "various apprehensions" could walk together in church fellowship. This committee reported at the October session, and the Court, after accepting their decision, formally declared the Congregational church established and its older customs approved, asserting that—
Whereas the Congregationall churches in these partes for the generall of their profession and practice have hitherto been approued, we can doe no less than still approue and countenance the same to be without disturbance until a better light in an orderly way doth appeare; but yet foreasmuch as sundry persons of worth for prudence and piety amongst us are otherwise perswaded (whose welfare and peaceable satisfaction we desire to accommodate) This Court doth declare that all such persons being also approued to lawe as orthodox and sound in the fundamentals of Christian religion may haue allowance of their perswasion and profession in church wayes or assemblies without disturbance.
The liberal church party had won the privileges for which they had contended, but the conservatives were not beaten, for it was upon their conception of church government that the Court set its seal of approval. The Court had been tolerant, and the churches must be also. Upon such terms, the old order was to continue "until a better light should appear." The tolerance toward changing conditions, thus expressed, was further emphasized by the Court's command to the churches to accept into full membership certain worthy people who could not bring themselves to agree fully with all the old order had demanded. The second part of the enactment just quoted was, strictly speaking, Connecticut's first toleration act; yet it must be realized that now, as later, the degree of toleration admitted no release from the support of an unacceptable ministry or from fines for neglect of its ministrations. Tolerance was here extended not to dissenters, but only to varying shades of opinions within a common faith and fold.
In the spirit of such legislation, the Court advised the Hartford church to "walk apart." The advice was accepted, the church divided, and the members who went out reorganized as the Second Church of Hartford. Other discordant churches quickly followed this example. The Second Church of Hartford immediately put forth a declaration, asserting that its Congregationalism was that of the old original New England type. The force of public opinion was so great, however, that despite its declaration, the Second Church began at once to accept the Half-Way Covenant. "The only result of their profession was to give a momentary name to the struggle as between Congregationalist and Presbyterian." [45] It was no effective opposition to the onward development in Connecticut of the new order. When the churches found that neither the old nor the new way was to be insisted upon, the violence of faction ceased. The dual membership was accepted. For a while, its line of cleavage away from the old system, with its local church "as a covenanted brotherhood of souls renewed by the experience of God's grace," was not realized, any more than that the new system was merging the older type of church "into the parish where all persons of good moral character, living within the parochial bounds, were to have, as in England and Scotland, the privilege of baptism for their households and of access to the Lord's table."[46] Another move in this direction was taken when the splitting off of churches, and the forming of more than one within the original parish bounds, necessitated a further departure from the principles of Congregationalism, and when the sequestration of lands for the benefit of clergy became a feature of the new order.[47] In this formation of new churches, the oldest parish was always the First Society.[ai] Those formed later did not destroy it or affect its antecedent agreements.[48] Only sixty-six years had passed (1603-1669) since the publication of the "Points of Difference" between the Separatists, the London-Amsterdam exiles, and the Church of England, wherein insistence had been laid upon the principles of a covenanted church, of its voluntary support, and of the unrighteousness of churches possessing either lands or revenue. The pendulum had swung from the broad democracy and large liberty of Brownism through Barrowism, past the Cambridge Platform (almost the centre of its arc), and on through the Half-Way Covenant to the beginning of a parish system. It had still farther to swing before it reached the end of the arc, marked by the Saybrook Platform, and before it began its slower return movement, to rest at last in the Congregationalism of the past seventy years.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] Among the causes assigned for the removal of the Connecticut colonists were the discontent at Watertown over the high-handed silencing by the Boston authorities of Pastor Phillips and Teacher Brown for daring to assert that the "churches of Rome were true churches;" the early attempt of the authorities to impose a general tax; the continued opposition to Ludlow; their desire to oppose the Dutch seizure of the fertile valley of the Connecticut; their want of space in the Bay Colony; and the "strong bent of their spirits to remove thither," i.e. to Connecticut.
The New England Way discarded the liturgy; refused to accept the sacrament or join in prayer after such an "anti-Christian form;" limited communion to church members approved by New England standards, or coming with credentials from churches similarly approved; limited the ministerial office, outside the pastor's own church, to prayer and conference, denying all authority; and assumed as the right of each church the power of elections, admissions, dismissals, censures, and excommunications. The result, in that day of intense championship of religious polity and custom, was to create disturbance and discord among the English Independent churches. The correspondence between the divines of New England and old England was in part to avoid the "breaking up of churches."
[c] J. R. Green, Short Hist. of the English People, 534-538. The great popular signing of the Covenant in Scotland was in 1638.
[d] The original intention, in 1642, in regard to the composition of the Westminster Assembly was to have noted divines from abroad. It was proposed to invite Rev. John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport from New England. Rev. Thomas Hooker thought the subject was not one of sufficient ecclesiastical importance for so long and difficult a journey, while the Rev. John Davenport could not be spared because of the absence of other church officers from New Haven.—H. M. Dexter, Congr. as seen, etc., p. 653.
Congregationalists or Independents in the sittings of the Assembly pleaded for liberty of conscience to all sects, "provided that they did not trouble the public peace." (Later, Congregationalists differentiated themselves from the Independents by adding to the principle of the independence of the local church the principle of the local sisterhood of the churches.) In the Assembly, averaging sixty or eighty members, Congregationalism was represented by but five influential divines and a few of lesser importance. There were also among the members some thirty laymen. The Assembly held eleven hundred and sixty-three sittings, continuing for a period of five years and six months. During these years the Civil War was fought; the King executed; the Commonwealth established with its modified state-church, Presbyterian in character. Intolerance was held in check by the power of Cromwell and of the army, for the Independents had made early and successful efforts to win the soldiery to their standard.—Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 727-820.
[e] W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms, p. 136, note 2.
[f] The New England Way defended its changes from English custom under three heads: (1) That things, inexpedient but not utterly unlawful in England, became under changed conditions sinful in New England. (2) Things tolerated in England, because unremovable, were shameful in the new land where they were removable. (3) Many things, upon mature deliberation and tried by Scripture, were found to be sinful. But: "We profess unfeignedly we separate from the corruptions, which we conceive to be left in your Churches, and from such Ordinances administered therein as we feare are not of God but of men; and for yourselves, we are so farre from separating as visible Christians as that you are under God in our hearts (if the Lord would suffer it) to live and die together; and we look at sundrie of you as men of that eminent growth in Christianitie, that if there be any visible Christians under heaven, amongst you are the men, which for these many years have been written in your forehead ('Holiness to the Lord'): and this is not to the disparagement of ourselves or our practice, for we believe that the Church moves on from age to age, its defects giving way to increasing purity from reformation to reformation."—J. Davenport, The Epistle Returned, or the Answer to the Letter of Many Ministers.
A number of treatises upon church government and usage were printed in the memorable year 1643, several of which had previously circulated in manuscript. In 1637 was received the Letter of Many Ministers in Old England, requesting the Judgment of their Reverend Brethren in New England and concerning Nine Positions. It was answered by John Davenport in 1639. A Reply and Answer was also a part of this correspondence, which was first published in 1643, as was also Richard Mather's Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, the latter being a reply to Two and Thirty Questions sent from England. By these, together with J. Cotton's Keyes and other writings, and by Thomas Hooker's great work Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (approved by the Synod of 1643), every aspect of church polity and usage was covered.
[g] Hingham church preferred the Presbyterian way. Concord was absent, lacking a fit representative. Boston and Salem at first refused to attend, questioning the General Court's right to summon a synod and fearing lest such a summons should involve the obedience of all the represented churches to the decisions of the conference. The modification of the summons to the "desire" of the court, and the entreaty of their leaders, finally overcame the opposition in these churches. In fact, delegates to the Court, representing at least thirty or forty churches, had hesitated to accept the original summons of the Court when reported as a bill for calling the synod. Although the Court "made no question of their lawful power by the word of God to assemble the churches, or their messengers upon occasion of counsell, or anything which may concern the practice of the churches," it decided to modify the phrasing of the order.—H. M. Dexter, Congr. as seen, p. 436. Magnalia, ii, 209. Mass. Col. Rec. ii, 154-156, also iii, 70-73.
[h] "This Synod having perused with much gladness of heart the confession of faith published by the late reverend assembly in England, do judge it to be very holy, orthodox and judicious, in all matters of faith, and do hereby freely and fully consent thereto for the substance thereof. Only in those things which have respect to church-government and discipline, we refer ourselves to the Platform of Church-discipline, agreed upon by this present assembly."—Preface to the Cambridge Platform, quoted in W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms, p. 195.
In many parts the wording of the Platform is almost identical with passages from the foremost ecclesiastical treatises of the period, and, naturally, since John Cotton, Richard Mather, and Ralph Partridge were each requested to draft a "Scriptural Model of Church Government." The Platform conformed most closely to that of Richard Mather. The draft by Ralph Partridge of Plymouth still exists. Obviously, the Separatist clergyman did not emphasize so strongly the rule of the eldership which New England church life in general had developed. Otherwise his plan did not differ essentially from that of Mather.
[j] "Even now, after a lapse of more than two hundred years the Platform (notwithstanding its errors here and there in the application of proof texts, and its one great error in regard to the power of the civil magistrate in matters of religion) is the most authentic exposition of the Congregational church as given in the scriptures."—Leonard Bacon, in Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Connecticut, ed. of 1865, p. 15.
[k] Cambridge Platform, chap. ii.
[l] Ibid. chap. ii.
[m] Cambridge Platform, chap. iii.
[n] The definition of the rule of the elders, given by the Rev. Samuel Stone of Hartford, was "A speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy."
[o] Cambridge Platform, chaps, iv-x.
[p] "We do believe that Christ hath ordained that there should be a Presbytery or Eldership and that in every Church, whose work is to teach and rule the Church by the Word and laws of Christ and unto whom so teaching and ruling, all the people ought to be obedient and submit themselves. And therefore a Government merely Popular or Democratieal… is far from the practice of these Churches and we believe far from the mind of Christ." However, the brethren should not be wholly excluded from its government or its liberty to choose its officers, admit members and censure offenders.—R. Mather, Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, pp. 47-50.
"The Gospel alloweth no Church authority or rule (properly so called) to the Brethren but reserveth that wholly to the Elders; and yet preventeth tyrannee, and oligarchy, and exorbitancy of the Elders by the large and firm establishment of the liberties of the Brethren."—J. Cotton, The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, p. 12.
"In regard to Christ, the head, the government of the Church, is sovereign and Monarchicall: In regard to the rule of the Presbytery, it is stewardly and Aristocraticall: In regard to the people's power in elections and censures, it is Democraticall."—The Keys, p. 36; see also Church-Government and Church Covenant, pp. 51-58.
[q] Cambridge Platform, chap, x.
[r] Ibid. chap. xiv.
Cambridge Platform, chap. ix.
[t] Ibid. chap. ix.
Ibid. chap. xi.
[v] Ibid. chap. xv.
[w] Cambridge Platform, chap. xvi.
[x] Cambridge Platform, chap. xvii.
According to Hooker's Survey the magistrates had the right to summon synods because they have the right to command the faculties of their subjects to deliberate concerning the good of the State.—Survey, pt. iv, p. 54 et seq.
[y] "However the controversy of the Connecticut River churches was embittered by political interests, it was essentially nothing else than the fermentation of that leaven of Presbyterianism which came over with the later Puritan emigration, and which the Cambridge Platform, with all its explicitness in asserting the rules given by the Scriptures, had not effectually purged."—L. Bacon, in Contrib. to Eccl. Hist. of Conn., p. 17.
See also H. M. Dexter, Congr. as seen in Lit., pp. 468-69.
Of the twenty-one contemporaneous documents, by various authors, none mention baptism as in any way an issue in debate. "Dr. Trumbull probably touches the real root of the affair when he speaks of the controversy as one concerning the 'rights of the brotherhood,' and the conviction, entertained by Mr. Goodwin, that these rights had been disregarded." The question of baptism ran parallel with the question under debate, incidentally mixed itself with and outlived it to be the cause of a later quarrel that should split the church.—G. L. Walker, First Church in Hartford, p. 154.
[z] Mr. Stone admitted: "(1) I acknowledge yt it is a liberty of ye church to declare their apprehensions by vote about ye fitness of a p'son for office upon his tryall.
(2) "I look at it as a received truth yt an officer may in some cases lawfully hinder ye church from putting forth at this or yt time an act of her liberty.
(3) "I acknowledge ye I hindered ye church fro declaring their apprehensions by vote (upon ye day in question) concerning Mr. Wigglesworth's fitness for office in ye church of Hartford."—Conn. Historical Society Papers, ii. 51-125.
[aa] In the New Haven letter, she wrote, "We hear the petitioners, or others closing with them, are very confident they shall obtain great alterations both in civil government and church discipline, and that some of them have procured and hired one as their agent, to maintain in writing (as it is conceived) that parishes in England, consenting to and continuing their meetings to worship God, are true churches, and such persons coming over thither, (without holding forth any work of faith) have all right to church privileges."—New Haven Col. Records, iii, 186.
[ab] That is, they assent to the main truths of the Gospel and promise obedience to the church they desire to join.
[ac] Among Massachusetts clergymen, Thomas Allen of Charlestown, 1642, Thomas Shepherd, Cambridge, 1649, John Norton, Ipswich, 1653, held that the baptismal privileges should be widened, and John Cotton himself was slowly drifting toward this opinion.
The Windsor church was the first in Connecticut to practice the Half-Way Covenant, January 31, 1657-58, to March 19, 1664-65, when the pastor, having doubts as to its validity, discontinued the practice until 1668, when it was again resumed.—Stiles, Ancient Windsor, p. 172.
[ad] Stone held his party on the ground that over a matter of internal discipline a synod had no control, and that he could exercise Congregational discipline upon any seceders. The immediate result was the removal of the discontented to Boston or to Hadley; where, however, they could not be admitted to another church until Stone had released them from his. This he refused to do. Thus, he showed the power of a minister, when backed by a majority, to inflict virtual excommunication. This could be done even though his authority was open to question.—J. A. Doyle, Puritan Colonies, ii, p. 77.
[ae] Meanwhile the Massachusetts Synod (purely local) of 1662 stood seven to one in favor of the Half-Way Covenant practice, and had reaffirmed the fellowship of the churches according to the synodical terms of the Cambridge Platform, as against a more authoritative system of consociation, proposed by Thomas Shepherd of Cambridge.
[af] It must be remembered that the "Church of England meant the aggregate of English Christians, whether in the upshot of the movements which were going on (1630-1660), their polity should turn out to be Episcopal or Presbyterian, or something different from either."—Palfrey, Comprehensive Hist. of New England, i, p. 111. J. R. Green, Short Hist. of the Eng. People, p. 544.
In England, Pitkin had been a member of the church of the
Commonwealth, and in all probability was not an Episcopalian or
Church-of-England man in the usual sense.
[ag] Such an order could only produce further disturbance. Stratford and Norwalk protested. As a rule the order was most unwelcome in the recently acquired New Haven colony. Mr. Pierson of Branford, with some of the conservative church people of Guilford and New Haven, went to New Jersey to escape its consequences.
[ah] Among the questions, still unanswered, which had been submitted in 1657 were: (9) "Whether it doth belong to the body of a town, collectively taken, jointly, to call him to be their minister whom the church shall choose to be their officer." (13) "Whether the church, her invitation and election of an officer, or preaching elder, necessitates the whole congregation to sit down satisfied, as bound to accept him as their minister though invited and settled without the town's consent." (ll) "Unto whom shall such persons repair who are grieved by any church process or censure, or whether they must acquiesce in the churches under which they belong."—Trumbull, Hist. of Conn. i, 302-3.
[ai] In New England Congregationalism, the church and the ecclesiastical society were separate and distinct bodies. The church kept the records of births, deaths, marriage, baptism, and membership, and, outside these, confined itself to spiritual matters; the society dealt with all temporal affairs such as the care and control of all church property, the payment of ministers' salaries, and also their calling, settlement, and dismissal.
CHAPTER V
A PERIOD OF TRANSITION
Alas for piety, alas for the ancient faith!
Though Massachusetts had been indifferent and had left Connecticut to work out, unaided, her religious problem, the two colonies were by no means unfriendly, and in each there was a large conservative party mutually sympathetic in their church interests. The drift of the liberal party in each colony was apart. The homogeneity of the Connecticut people put off for a long while the embroilments, civil and religious, to which Massachusetts was frequently exposed through her attempts to restrain, restrict, and force into an inflexible mould her population, which was steadily becoming more numerous and cosmopolite. The English government received frequent complaints about the Bay Colony, and, as a result, Connecticut, by contrast of her "dutiful conduct" with that of "unruly Massachusetts," gained greater freedom to pursue her own domestic policy with its affairs of Church and State. Many of its details were unknown, or ignored, by the English government. The period when the four colonies had been united upon all measures of common welfare, whether temporal or spiritual, had passed. There were now three colonies. One of these, much weaker than the others, was destined within comparatively few years to be absorbed by Massachusetts as New Haven had been by Connecticut. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and Connecticut were developing along characteristic lines and had each its individual problems to pursue. While in ecclesiastical affairs the conservative factions in the two colonies had much in common and continued to have for a long time, the Reforming Synod of 1679-80, held in Boston, was the last in which all the New England churches had any vital interest, because a period of transition was setting in. This period of transition was marked by an expansion of settlements with its accompanying spirit of land-grabbing, and by a lowering of tone in the community, as material interests superseded the spiritual ones of the earlier generations, and as the Indian and colonial wars spread abroad a spirit of license. In the religious life of the colonists, this transition made itself felt not alone in the character of its devotees, but in the ecclesiastical system itself, as it changed from the polity and practice embodied in the Cambridge Platform to that of a later day, and to the almost Presbyterian government expressed in the Saybrook Platform of 1708. The transition in Massachusetts, in both secular and religious development, varied greatly from that in Connecticut. Hence, from the time of the Keforming Synod, the history of Connecticut is almost entirely the story of its own career, touching only at points the historical development of the other New England colonies. On the religious side, it is the story of the evolution of Connecticut's peculiar Congregationalism. The Reforming Synod of 1679-80 had been called by the Massachusetts General Court because, in the words of that old historian, Thomas Prince:—
A little after 1660, there began to appear Decay, And this increased to 1670, when it grew very visible and threatening, and was generally complained of and bewailed bitterly by the pious among them (the colonists): and yet more to 1680, when but few of the first Generation remained. [49]
The reasons of this falling away from the standards of the first generation were many. In the first place, the colonists had become mere colonials. Upon the Stuart restoration, the strongest ties which bound them to the pulsing life of the mother country, the religious ones, were severed. The colonists ceased to be the vanguard of a great religious movement, the possible haven of a new political state. Though they received many refugees from Stuart conformity, the religious ties which bound them to the English nonconformists were weakened, and still more so when both the once powerful wings of the Puritan party, Presbyterian and Independent, were alike in danger of extinction. Shortly after the Revolution of 1688, when, under the larger tolerance of William and Mary, the Presbyterians and Independents strove to increase their strength by a union based upon the "Heads of Agreement," English and colonial nonconformity moved for a brief time nearer, and then still farther apart. The "Heads of Agreement"[a] was a compromise so framed as to admit of acceptance by the Presbyterian who recognized that he must, once for all, give up his hope of a national church, and by the Independent anxiously seeking some bond of authority to hold together his weak and scattered churches. After this compromise, the religious life of the colonies ceased to be of vital importance to any large section of the English people. After the Restoration the colonial agents became preeminently interested in secular affairs, in political privileges, and commercial advantages. The reaction was felt in the colonies by generations who lacked the heroic impulses of their fathers, their constant incentive, and their high standards. Moreover, the education of the second and third generation could not be like that of the first. The percentage of university men was less. New Harvard could not supply the place of old Cambridge. If life was easier, it was more material.
Against such conditions as these, the Reforming Synod made little headway. It set forth in thirteen questions the offenses of the day and in the answer to each suggested remedies. To these questions and answers the synod added a confession of faith. This last was a reaffirmation of the Westminster Confession of Faith as amended and approved by Parliament, or that found in the Savoy Declaration.[c] In respect to church government, the Reforming Synod confirmed the "substance of the Platform of Discipline agreed upon by the messengers of these Churches at Cambridge, Anno Domini, 1648," [50] desiring the churches to "continue steadfast in the Order of the Gospel according to what is therein declared from the Word of God." Cotton Mather in the "Magnalia," [5l] writing twenty years later, gives four points of departure from the Cambridge polity by the Reforming Synod. First, occasional officiations of ministers outside their own churches were authorized; secondly, there was a movement to revive the authority and office of ruling elder and other officers; thirdly, "plebeian ordination," or lay ordination, ordination by the hands of the brethren of the church in the absence of superior officers, was no longer allowed;[d] and fourthly, there was a variation from the "personal and public confession" in favor of a private examination by the pastor of candidates for church-membership, though the earlier custom was still regarded as "lawful, expedient and useful." With reference to the office of ruling elder, it had been done away with in many churches, partly because of lack of suitable men to fill the office, partly because of the mistakes of incompetents, and partly because of a growing doubt as to the Scriptural sanction for such an office. In many churches the office of teacher had also been abolished, the pastor inheriting all the authority formerly lodged in the eldership, and as he retained his power of veto, it came about that the churches were largely in the power of one man.
Plymouth and Connecticut colonies strongly approved the work of this local Massachusetts synod. As a result of the interest excited by its suggestions to increase church discipline, for laws to encourage morality and Christian instruction, and for renewed zeal on the part of individuals in godly living, a goodly number of converts were immediately added to the churches throughout all the colonies. Of these, the larger number were admitted on the Half-Way Covenant. But times had changed, and the churches could not keep pace. The attempts to enforce religion were fruitless,[e] and only go to show that political interests, that wars,[f] with their accompanying excitement and license, and that engrossing civil affairs had torn men's minds from the old interests in religious controversies and in religious customs.
The Church itself had deteriorated as the towns in their civil capacity had undertaken the support of the minister and to collect his rates. Even earlier began, also, the gradual change by which the election of the minister passed from the small group of church communicants, or full membership, to the larger body of the Society, and finally to the town. This change was partly brought about through the increasing acceptance of the Half-Way Covenant with its attendant results. In some localities, "owning the Covenant" and presenting one's children for baptism came to be considered not as a necessary fulfilling of inherited duties (because of inherited baptismal privileges) and the consequent recognition of moral obligations, but as meritorious acts, having of themselves power to benefit the participants. Further, the rite of baptism, confined at first to children one at least of whose parents had been baptized, was later permitted to any for whom a satisfactory person—any one not flagrantly immoral—could be found to promise that the child should have religious training. Still another factor in the lowering of religious life was Stoddardeanism, or the teaching of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, a most powerful preacher and for many years the most influential minister throughout the Connecticut valley. As early as 1679, he began to teach that baptized persons, who had owned the covenant, should be admitted to the Lord's Supper, so that the rite itself might exercise in them a regenerating grace. In its origin, this teaching was probably intended as a protest against a morbid, introspective, and weakening self-examination on the part of many who doubted their fitness to go to communion. But as a result of the interworking of this teaching and of the practice of the Half-Way Covenant, church membership came in time to include almost any one not openly vicious, and willing to give intellectual, or nominal, assent to church doctrines and also to a few church regulations. With the change, the large body of townsmen became the electors of the minister. Cotton Mather in the "Ratio Disciplinæ" [52] illustrates these changing conditions when he tells us that the communicants felt that the right to elect the minister was invested in them as the real church of Christ, and that, in order to avoid strife or the defeat of their candidate by the majority of the town, they would customarily propose a choice between two nominees.
Carelessness of the churches in admitting members had had its counterpart in the carelessness of the towns in admitting inhabitants. Very early, as early as 1658, the Connecticut General Court had been obliged to call them to order. The March session of 1658-59 had limited the franchise to all inhabitants of twenty-one years of age or over who were householders (that is, married men), and who had thirty pounds estate, or who had borne office. This was shortly changed to "thirty pounds of proper personal estate," or who had borne office. The ratable estate in the colony averaged sixty pounds per inhabitant at this time. Up to March, 1658-59, the towns had admitted inhabitants by a majority vote. These admitted inhabitants, armed with a certificate of good character from their town, presented themselves before the General Court as candidates for the freeman's franchise, and were admitted or not as the Court saw fit. Disfranchisement was the penalty for any scandalous behavior on the part of the successful candidate. One reason for the new and restrictive legislation was that from 1657 to 1660, from some cause unknown, large numbers of undesirable colonists flocked into the Connecticut towns, and thus it happened that, as the Church broadened her idea of membership, the State had need to limit its conception of democracy. Consequently, it narrowed the franchise by adding to the original requirements a large property qualification, and continued to demand the certificates of good character. Moreover, the candidates were further required to present their credentials in October, and they were not to be passed upon until the next session of the Court in the following April. This two-fold change in the religious and political life of the colony gave greater flexibility and greater security, for "with church and state practically intertwined, the theory of the one had been too narrow and of the other too broad." [53] After the change in the franchise, records of the towns show that there was less disorder in admitting inhabitants and more care taken as to their personal character.
As the townsmen became the electors of the minister, and when the new latitude in membership had been accepted by the churches, there soon appeared a growing slackness of discipline and also an increase of authority in the hands of the ministers and their subordinate deaconry. This excess of authority in the hands of one man tended to one-man rule and to frequent friction between the minister and his people. As a result councils might be called against councils in the attempt to settle questions or disputes between pastors and people. Consequently, among conservatives, there came to be the feeling that there ought to be some authoritative body to supervise the churches,—one to which both pastor and people could appeal disputed points.
In Massachusetts, the Connecticut colonists saw a strenuous attempt to establish such an authority. Between 1690 and 1705, the Massachusetts clergy had revived the early custom of fortnightly meetings of neighboring ministers. The new associations were purely voluntary ones for mutual assistance, for debate upon matters of common interest, or for consultation over special difficulties, whether pertaining to churches or to their individual members, which might be brought before them. These associations grew in favor, and later became a permanent feature of New England Congregationalism. Because they were received with so much, favor at the time of their revival, the conservative Massachusetts clergy attempted in the "Proposals of 1705" to increase the ministerial and synodical power within the churches, and to bring about a reformation in manners and morals by giving to these associations very large and authoritative powers. The Proposals provided that all ministers should be joined in Associations for mutual help and advice; for licensing candidates for the ministry; for providing for pastorless churches; for a general oversight of religion, and for the examination of charges brought against their own members. Standing Councils, composed of delegates from the Associations and also of a proper number of delegates (apparently laymen) to represent the membership of the churches, were to be established. These were to control all church matters throughout the colony that were "proper for the consideration of an ecclesiastical council," and obedience to their judgments was to be enforced under penalty of forfeiture of church-fellowship. The Proposals were approved by the majority of the Massachusetts clergy; but the liberal party within the churches would not accede to their demands, and the General Court would not sanction the Proposals in the face of such opposition. Consequently, the essential feature of the Proposals, the Standing Councils, was never adopted. But the attempt to establish them invigorated the Associations, and the licensing of candidates was arranged for.
Many people in Connecticut approved the tenor of the Proposals and desired a similar system. Moreover, there never was a time when the General Court was so ready to delegate to an ecclesiastical body the control of the churches. The trustees of the young college, Yale, the most representative gathering of clergymen in the colony, were anxious to have the Court establish some system of ecclesiastical government stronger than that existing among the churches, and to have it send out some approved confession of faith and discipline. Consequently, when, in 1708, Guerdon Saltonstall,[g] the popular ex-minister of New London, was raised to the governor's chair, the time seemed ripe for a move to satisfy the widespread demand. In response to it, the May session of the General Court—
from their own observation and the complaints of many others, being made sensible of the defects of the discipline of the churches of this government, arising from want of a more explicit asserting of the rules given for that in the holy scriptures [saw fit] to order and require the ministers of the several churches in the several counties of this government to meet together at their respective countie towns, with such messengers as the churches to which they belong shall see cause to send with them on the last day of June next, there to consider and agree upon those methods and rules for the management of ecclesiastical discipline which shall be judged agreable and conformable to the word of God, and shall at the same meeting appoint two or more of their number to meet together at Saybrook… where they shall compare the results of the ministers of the several counties, and out of which and from them to draw a form of ecclesiastical discipline, which by two or more persons delegated by them shall be offered this Court … and be confirmed by them. [54]
The bill was passed by the Upper House of the legislature and sent to a conference from the Lower, May 22, 1708. It became a law May 22. In the interim the words in italics were inserted in order to eliminate any possible loss of liberty to the churches and to protect them from a system of government, planned by ministers only, and enforced by the General Court. [55]
No records of the preliminary meeting have come down to us, but the Preface of the Saybrook Platform reports such a meeting and that their delegates met at Saybrook, September 9, 1708. At this second convention, twelve ministers, of whom eight were trustees of Yale, and four messengers were present. Their work, known as the Saybrook Platform, declares in its Preface that—
we agree that the confession of faith owned & consented unto by the Elders and messengers of the Chhs assembled at Boston in New England, May 12, 1680 being the Second Session of that Synod be Recommended to the Honbl. the Gen. Assembly of this Colony at the next Session for their Publick testimony thereto as the faith of the Chhs of this Colony.
We agree also that the Heads of Agreement assented to by the vnited Ministers formerly Called Presbyterian & Congregationall be observed by the Chhs throout this Colony.
The work of the synod, including also a series of authoritative "Articles," was laid before the October session of the Court and received its approval, the Court declaring its "great approbation of such a happy agreement" and ordaining "that all churches within this government that are or shall be thus united in doctrine, worship and discipline, be and for the future shall be owned and acknowledged established by law." [58]
The period of transition was over. Connecticut had passed from the individual consecration and democratic organization of the Cambridge Platform to the comprehensive membership of a parish system and to the authoritative councils, or ecclesiastical courts, provided for by the Saybrook Articles. A consideration of them as the main points of the Platform is next in order.
FOOTNOTES:
[a] The "Heads of Agreement" was destined to have more influence in America than in England.
The order of the Massachusetts Court was "for the revisall of the discipline agreed upon by the churches, 1647, and what else may appeare necessary for the preventing schism, haeresies, prophaneness, and the establishment of the churches in one faith and order of the gospell." There was no questioning of the Court's right to summon this synod, as there had been in 1646-48.
[c] The Savoy Declaration of October, 1658, was put forth by the English leaders of the Independent, or Congregational, churches as a confession of faith, and in its thirty articles contained a declaration of church order. The formulated principles of church order were suggested by the Cambridge Platform but were neither so clear nor so fully stated as in the New England document. The Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the later Heads of Agreement, were destined to have more influence in New England than in England, where the effect was transient. The Reforming Synod preferred the Savoy Declaration to the Westminster Confession because the terms of the former were more strictly Congregational, and also because they wished to hold a confession in common with their trans-Atlantic brethren. The Massachusetts synod changed here and there a word in order to emphasize the church-membership of children as a right derived through the Half-Way Covenant, and also to state explicitly the right of the civil authority to interfere in questions of doctrine.
[d] In 1660 the lay ordination of the Rev. Thomas Buckingham of Saybrook, Conn., was strongly opposed by a council of churches, but it was reluctantly yielded to the insistent church.—J. B. Felt, Eccl. History, ii, 207.
[e] "Whereas this Court [the General Court of Connecticut] in the calamitous times of '75 and '76 were moved to make some laws for the suppression of some provoaking evils which were feared to be growing up amongst us: viz.—prophanation of the Sabbath; neglect of catechizing children and servants and famaly prayer; young persons shaking off the government of parents or masters; boarders and inmates neglecting the worship of God in famalyes where they reside; tipling & drinkeing; uncleanness; oppression in workmen and traders; which laws have little prevailed. It is therefore ordered by this Court that the selectmen constables and grand-jury men in their several plantations shall have a special care in their respective places to promote the due and full attendance of these aforementioned orders of this Court."
[f] King Philip's War, 1675-76; the usurpation of Andros; King William's War, 1689-97, with its expedition against Quebec; Queen Anne's War, 1702-13.
[g] Governor Saltonstall "was more inclined to synods and formularies than any other minister of that day in the New England colonies." His influence over the clergy was almost absolute. "The Saybrook Platform was stamped with his seal and was for the most part an embodiment of his views."—Hollister, Hist. of Conn. vol. ii, p. 585.
CHAPTER VI
THE SAYBROOK PLATFORM
A Government within a Government.
The Saybrook Platform subdivides into a Confession of Faith, the Heads of Agreement, and the Fifteen Articles.
The Confession of Faith is merely a recommendation of the Savoy Confession as reaffirmed by the Synod of Boston or the Reforming Synod of 1680.
The Heads of Agreement are but a repetition of the articles that, under the same title, were passed in London, in 1691, by fourteen delegates from the Presbyterian and English Congregational churches. Both parties to the Agreement had hoped thereby to establish more firmly their churches and to give them the strength and dignity of a strongly united body. The Heads of Agreement were drafted by three men, Increase Mather, the Massachusetts colonial agent to England, Matthew Mead, a Congregationalist, and John Hone, a Presbyterian, who in his earlier years and by training was a Congregationalist. Naturally, between the influence of the framers and the necessity for including the two religious bodies, this platform inclined towards Congregationalism, but equal necessity led it away from the freedom of the Cambridge Platform, after which it was patterned.
In the Heads of Agreement, the composition of the church is defined according to Congregational standards, as is also the election of its officers. The definition of the powers of the church is not strictly Congregational, because initiative action and governing powers are intrusted to the eldership, while, to the brethren, there is given only the privilege of assenting to such measures as the elders may place before them. The membership in the church, as defined, is semi-Congregational; i. e., in order to become members, persons must be "grounded in the Fundamental Doctrines of religion" and lead moral lives, but they are eligible to communion only after the declaration of their desire "to walk together according to Gospel Rule." Concerning this declaration the statement is made that "different degrees of Expliciteness shall in no way hinder such Churches from owning each other as Instituted Churches." Furthermore, no one should be pressed to declare the time and manner of his conversion as proof of his fitness to be received as a communicant. Such an account would, however, be welcome. With reference to parochial bounds, introduced into the primitive Congregationalism of New England, but always existing in the English Presbyterian system, the Heads of Agreement declare them to be "not of Divine Right" but—
for common Edification that church members should live near one another, nor ought they to forsake their church for another without its consent and recommendation.
In respect to the ministry, the Heads of Agreement affirm that it should be learned and competent and approved; that ordinarily, pastors should be considered as ministers only while they continue in office over the church that elected them to its ministry; that ordinarily, in their choosing and calling, advice should be sought from neighboring churches, and that they should be ordained with the aid of neighboring pastors. In the matter of installation into a new office of an elder, previously ordained, churches are to exercise the right of individual judgment and of preference as to reordination. This same right of preference is to be exercised in deciding whether or not a church should support a ruling elder. The Heads of Agreement assert that in the intercommunion of churches there is to be no subordination among them, and that there ought to be frequent friendly consultations between their "Officers." There are to be "Occasional Meetings of Ministers" of several churches to consult and advise upon "weighty and difficult cases," and to whose judgments, "particular Churches, their respective Elders and Members, ought to have a reverential regard, and not dissent therefrom, without apparent grounds from the word of God." The Heads of Agreement command churches to yield obedience and support to the civil authority and to be ready at all times to give the magistrates an account of their affairs.
The Heads of Agreement were the most liberal part of the Saybrook Platform, and were not considered sufficiently authoritative. Accordingly,—
for the Better Regulation of the Administration of Chh Discipline in Relation to all Cases Ecclesiastical both in Particular Chhs and In Councils to the full Determining and Executing of the Rules in all such cases,[57]—
were added certain resolutions, known as the "Fifteen Articles." They are in reality the Platform, for all that goes before them is but a reaffirmation of principles already accepted, and the new thing in the document, the advance in ecclesiasticism, is the increased authority permitted and, later, enforced by these Fifteen Articles.
The Articles affirm that power and discipline in connection with all cases of scandal that may arise within a church, ought, the brethren consenting, to be lodged with the elder or elders; and that in all difficult cases, the pastor should take advice of the elders of the neighboring churches before proceeding to censure or pass judgment. In order to facilitate both discipline and mutual oversight, the Articles provide that elders and pastors are to be joined in Associations, meeting at least twice a year, to consult together upon questions of ministerial duty and upon matters of mutual benefit to their churches. From these Associations, delegates were to be chosen annually to meet in one General Association, holding its session in the spring, at the time of the general elections. The Associations were to look after pastorless churches and to recommend candidates for the ministry. Up to this time a man's bachelor of arts degree had been considered sufficient guarantee that he would make a capable minister. Henceforth, there could no longer be complaint that "there was no uniform method of introducing candidates to the ministry nor sufficient opportunity for churches to confer together in order to their seeing and acting harmoniously." [58] In order that there should be no more confusion arising from calling councils against councils with their often conflicting judgments, the Articles formed Consociations, or unions of churches within certain limits, usually those of a county. These Consociations were to assist upon all great or important ecclesiastical occasions. They were to preside over all ordinations or installations; they were to decide upon the dismissal of members, and upon all difficulties arising within any church within their district. If necessary, Consociations could be joined in council. Their decisions were to have the force of a judgment or sentence only when they were "approved by the major part of the elders present and by such a number of the messengers"—one or two from each church—as should constitute a majority vote. A church could call upon its Consociation for advice before sentencing an offender, but the offender could not appeal to the Consociation without the consent of his church. By these last provisions, authority and power tended still more to concentrate in the hands of the elders. The Fifteen Articles, though they did not make the judgments of the Consociations decisive, urged upon individual churches a reverent regard for them.
The attitude of the churches towards these Fifteen Articles varied, and it was already known in the Synod that such would be the case. Some churches would find them more palatable than others. Many were already converts to the Rev. Solomon Stoddard's insistent teaching that "a National Synod is the highest ecclesiastical authority upon earth," [59] that every man must stand to the judgment of a National Synod. Even five years before the convening of the Synod at Saybrook, there had issued from a meeting of the Yale trustees,[a] "altogether the most representative ecclesiastical gathering in the colony," a circular letter which urged the Connecticut ministers to agree on some unifying confession of creed, and that such be recommended by the General Court to the consideration of the people. The immediate answer to the letter, if any, is unknown. Trumbull says that—
the proposal was universally acceptable, and the churches and the ministers of the several counties met in a consociated council and gave their assent to the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. [60]
It seems that they also "drew up certain rules of ecclesiastical discipline as preparatory to a General Synod which they still had in contemplation,"[61] but took no further step to obtain the approval of the Court. This first definite move toward the Saybrook system bore fruit when the Fifteen Articles were added to the Platform. Their authoritative tone was to satisfy those within the churches who preferred Presbyterian classes and synods, while their interpretation could be modified to please the adherents of a purer Congregationalism by reading them in the light of the Heads of Agreement which preceded them. Of their possible purport two great authorities upon Congregationalism speak as follows. Dr. Bacon writes:—
The "Articles" by whomsoever penned, were obviously a compromise between the Presbyterian interest and the Congregational; and like most compromises, they were (I do not say by design) of doubtful interpretation. Interpreted by a Presbyterian, they might seem to subject the Churches completely to the authoritative government of classes or presbyteries under the name of consociations. Interpreted by a Congregationalist, they might seem to provide for nothing more than a stated Council, in which neighboring Churches, voluntarily confederate, could consult together, and the proper function of which should be not to speak imperatively, but, when regularly called, to "hold forth light" in cases of difficulty or perplexity.[62]
Dr. Dexter sums them up in the following words:—
Taken by themselves, the fifteen articles were stringent enough to satisfy the most ardent High Churchmen among the Congregationalists of that day; taken, however, in connection with the London document previously adopted, and by the spirit of which—apparently—they were always to be construed, their stringency became matter of differing judgment, so that what on the whole was their intent has never been settled to this day. [63]
In accordance with the system of government outlined in the Platform, the churches of the colony were at once formed into five Associations and five Consociations, one each in New Haven, New London, and Fairfield counties, and two in Hartford. In later years, new bodies were organized, as the other four Connecticut counties were set off from these original ones. The churches of the New Haven county Consociation, long cleaving to the purest Congregationalism, refused to adopt the Platform until they had recorded their liberal construction of it. Fairfield went to the other extreme, and put on record their acceptance of the Consociations as church courts. Hartford and New London accepted the Platform as a whole, as it came from the synod, leaving to time the decision as to its loose or strict construction.
A legislative act was necessary to make the Platform the legal constitution of the Congregational Establishment. Such an act immediately followed the presentation of the report by the committee, whom the Saybrook convention, in accordance with the Court's previous command, sent to the Assembly. Having examined the Platform, the Legislature declared its strong approval of such a happy agreement, and in October, 1708, enacted that—
all the Churches within this government that are, and shall be thus united in doctrine, worship and discipline, be, and for the future shall be, owned and acknowledged, established by law:
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.