The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut by M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

M >> M. Louise Greene, Ph. D. >> The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut

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These laws restrained both _ordained Ministers_ and
_licensed candidates_ from preaching in _other_ Men's
Parishes without _their_ and the _Church's_ consent and
wholly prohibited the _Exhortations of Illiterate Laymen_.

These laws were a high-handed infringement of the rights of
conscience, and in a few years fell and buried with them the party
that had enacted them. These were the laws which he (Davenport)
exhorted his hearers to set at defiance; and seldom, it must be
acknowledged, has a more plausible occasion been found in New
England to preach disregard for the law.

The laws were framed to repress itinerants and exhorters through loss
of their civil rights. By them, a man's good name was dishonored and
he was deprived of all his temporal emoluments. By many, in their own
day, the laws were regarded as contrary to scriptural commands, and to
the opinion and practice of all reformers and of all Puritans. These
laws, with others that followed, were not warranted by the
ecclesiastical constitution of the colony, and could find no parallel
either in England or in her other colonies. Trumbull calls them--

a concerted plan of the Old Lights or Arminians both among the
clergy and civilians, to suppress as far as possible, all zealous
Calvinistic preachers, to confine them entirely to their own
pulpits; and at the same time to put all the public odium and
reproach upon them as wicked, disorderly men, unfit to enjoy the
common rights of citizens. [109]

Yet for these laws the Association of New Haven sent a vote of thanks
to the Assembly when it convened in their city in the following fall.

Jonathan Edwards opposed both the spirit of the General Consociation
and also the legislation of the Assembly. He expressed his attitude
toward the Great Awakening both at the time and later. In 1742 he
wrote:--

If ministers preached never so good a doctrine, and are never so
laborious in their work, yet if at such a day as this they show
their people that they are not well affected to this work [of
revival], they will be very likely to do their people a great deal
more hurt than good.

Six years later Edwards wrote a preface to his "An Humble Inquiry into
the Qualifications for Full Communion in the Visible Church of God," a
treatise severely condemning the Half-Way Covenant, and urging the
revival of the early personal account of conversion. In this preface
he excuses his hesitation in publishing the work, on the ground that
he feared the Separatists would seize upon his arguments to encourage
them and strengthen them in many of their reprehensible
practices. These, Edwards reminds his reader, he had severely
condemned in his earlier publications, notably in his "Treatise on
Religious Affections," 1746, and in his "Observations and Reflections
on Mr. Brainerd's Life." In his preface Edwards repeats his
disapproval of the Separatist "notion of a _pure church_ by means
of a _spirit of discerning_; their _censorious outcries_
against the standing ministers and churches in general, their _lay
ordinations_, their _lay-preaching_ and _public
exhortings_ and administering sacraments; and their
self-complacent, presumptuous spirit." Edwards believed that
enthusiasts, though unlettered, might exhort in private, and even in
public religious gatherings might be encouraged to relate in a proper,
earnest, and modest manner their religious experiences, and might also
entreat others to become converted. He maintained that much of the
criticism of an inert ministry was well founded, that much of the
enthusiastic work of laymen and of the itinerants deserved to be
recognized by the regular clergy, and that they ought to bestir
themselves in furthering such enthusiasm among their own
people. Edwards urged also his belief in the value of good works, not
as meriting the reward of future salvation, but as manifesting a heart
stirred by a proper appreciation of God's attributes. Jonathan Edwards
held firmly to the foundation principles of the conservative school,
while he sympathized with and supported the best elements in the
revival movement.

This attitude of Edwards eventually cost him his pastorate, for he
judged it best to resign from the Northampton church, in 1750, because
of the unpopularity arising from his repeated attacks upon the
Half-Way Covenant and the Stoddardean view of the Lord's
supper. Nevertheless, it was the influence of Jonathan Edwards and of
his following which gradually brought about a union of the religious
parties, after the Separatists had given up their eccentricities and
the leaven of Edwards' teachings had brought a new and invigorated
life into the Connecticut churches. This preacher, teacher, and
evangelist was remarkable for his powerful logic, his deep and tender
feeling, his sincere and vivid faith. These characteristics urged on
his resistless imagination, when picturing to his people their
imminent danger and the awful punishment in store for those who
continued at enmity with God. Of his work as a theologian, we shall
have occasion to speak elsewhere.

Some illustrations of church life in the troublous years following the
Great Awakening will best set forth the confusion arising, the
difficulties between Old and New Lights, and the hardships of the
Separatists. Among the colony churches, the trials of three may be
taken as typical,--the New Haven church[110], the Canterbury
church,[111] and the church of Enfield.[112] Nor can the story of the
first two be told without including in it an account of later acts of
the Assembly and of the attitude of the College during the years of
the great schism.

The pastor of the New Haven church was Mr. Noyes, whom many of his
parishioners thought too noncommittal, erroneous, or pointless in
discussing the themes which the itinerant preachers loved to dwell
upon. Moreover, Mr. Noyes had refused to allow the Rev. George
Whitefield to preach from his pulpit while on his memorable pilgrimage
through New England. Mr. Noyes had also forbidden the hot-headed
James Davenport to occupy it. As a result of their minister's actions,
the New Haven church was divided in their estimate of their
pastor. There were the friendly Old Lights and the hostile New.
Neither party wished to carry their trouble before the Consociation of
New Haven county, for that had come at last to be a tribunal "whose
decision was at that time considered _judicial_ and
_final_." Moreover, at the meeting of the General Consociation at
Guilford in November, 1741, it was known that Mr. Noyes had been a
most active worker in favor of suppressing the New Light
movement. Consequently the New Lights, though at the time in the
minority, sought to find a way out from under the jurisdiction of the
Saybrook Platform and its councils by declaring that the church had
never _formally_ been made a Consociated church. This was
literally true, but the weight of precedent and their own observances
were against them. Like other churches in the county, which had come
slowly to the acceptance of the Saybrook councils as ecclesiastical
courts, it had finally accepted them in their most authoritative
character. Such being the case, the New Lights hesitated to appeal
against their minister before a court presumably favorable to
him. After the New Lights had declared the church not under the
Saybrook system, Mr. Noyes determined to take the vote of his people
as to whether they considered themselves a Consociated church. But as
he was a little fearful of the result of the vote, he secured the
victory for his own faction by excluding the New Lights from
voting. Thereupon, the New Lights took the benefit of the Toleration
Act as "sober dissenters," and became a Separate church. The
committee, appointed for the organization of the new church, declared
that "they were reestablished as the original church." The benefit of
the Toleration Act accorded to these New Light dissenters in New
Haven, to some in Milford,[b] and to several other reinvigorated
churches in the southern part of the colony, roused the opposition of
the Old Lights in the Assembly, and, as they counted a majority, they
repealed the act in the following year, 1743. Three or four weeks
after the New Haven New Lights had formed what was afterwards known as
the North Church, the General Assembly met for its fall session in
that city, and, as has been said, the New Haven Association
immediately sent a vote of thanks for the stringent laws passed at the
May meeting. The Court, moved by this indication of the popular
feeling, by the importance of the church schism and its influence
throughout the colony, by the conservative attitude of Yale College,
and also by having among its delegates large numbers of Old Lights,
proceeded to enact yet more stringent measures than those of the
preceding session. The result was that the North Church could hire no
preacher until they could find one acceptable to the First Church and
Society, because the pastor elected by the First Church was the only
lawfully appointed minister, since he owed his election to the
majority votes of the First Society. Furthermore, the Court, in 1743,
refused a special application of the North Church for permission to
settle their chosen minister, and it was some five or six years before
it ceased this particular kind of persecution and permitted the church
to have a regular pastor.

The story of this New Haven church extends beyond the time-limit of
this chapter, but it is better completed here. The stringency of the
laws only increased the bitterness of faction. In 1745, feeling ran so
high that a father refused to attend his son's funeral merely because
they belonged to opposing factions, and an attempt to build a house of
worship for this Separate church resulted in serious disturbances and
in the charge of incendiarism. The New Lights preferred imprisonment
to the payment of taxes assessed for the benefit of the First
Church. At last, in 1751, the October session of the General Assembly
thought it best "for the good of the colony and for the peace and
harmony of this and other churches" infected by its example, to advise
that the differences within it be healed by a council to be composed
of both Old and New Lights.[113] The suggestion bore no fruit, and a
year later the New Lights themselves again asked for a council, even
offering to apologize to the First Church for their informality in
separating from it, and for their part in the heated controversy that
followed; but Mr. Noyes induced his party to refuse to accede to the
proposed conference. As the North Church had grown strong enough by
this time to support a regular pastor, Mr. Bird accepted its call; yet
for six years longer, because the Assembly refused to divide the
society, the New Lights were held to be members of the First Society
and taxable for its support. But in 1757, the New Lights gained the
majority both in church and society, a majority of _one_. At
once, the New Lights were released from taxes to the First Church. Now
the dominant party, they attempted to pay back old scores, and
accordingly demanded a division of both church and society
property. The claim to the first was unfair, and they eventually
abandoned it. The church quarrel finally ceased in 1759, after a
duration of eighteen years, and in 1760 Mr. Bird was formally
installed with fitting honors.

In the early days of the Great Awakening, the Canterbury church became
divided into Old Lights and New, and a separation took place. Before
the separation, a committee, who were appointed to look up the church
records, gave it as their opinion that the church was not and never
had been pledged to the Saybrook Platform. Nevertheless, the very men
who gave this decision became the leaders of the minority, who
determined to support the government in carrying out its oppressive
laws of 1742. These laws had been passed while the committee were
searching the church records. The majority of the church, incensed at
having their liberty curtailed, proceeded to defy the law by listening
to lay exhorters and to itinerants just as they had been in the habit
of doing ever since the church had felt the quickening influences of
the Great Awakening. This majority declared that it was "regular for
this church to admit persons into this church that are in full
communion with other churches and come regularly to this." This
decision the minority characterized as unlawful according to the
recent acts of the Assembly. The majority proceeded to argue the
right of the majority in the church as above the right of the majority
in the society, or parish, to elect the minister and to guide the
church. In an attempt to satisfy both parties, candidates were tried,
but they could not command a sufficient number of votes from either
side to be located permanently. A meeting in 1743 of the Consociation
of Windham (to whose jurisdiction the Canterbury church belonged),
together with a council of New Lights, brought temporary peace. A
candidate was agreed upon; but in a few months the New Lights became
dissatisfied with him because of his approval of the Saybrook system
of church government, his acceptance of the Half-Way Covenant, and
other opinions. Controversy revived. The majority of the church
withdrew, and for a while met in a private house for services, which
were conducted by Solomon Paine or by some other layman. As a result,
the Windham Association passed a vote of censure against the
seceders. Paine wrote a sharp retort, for which he was arrested,
although ostensibly on the charge of unlawfully conducting public
worship. He refused to give bonds and was committed to Windham jail
in September, 1744. Such crowds flocked to the prison yard to hear him
preach, and excitement ran so high, that the officer who had conducted
his trial appeared before the Assembly to protest that such legal
proceedings did but tend to increase the disorders they were intended
to cure. Accordingly, Paine was released in October.

The interest of the whole colony was now centred on the defiant and
determined Canterbury Separate church, and the November meeting of the
Windham Association had the schism under consideration, when Yale
expelled two Canterbury students whose parents were members of that
church.

In October, 1742, in order to protect the college and the ministry and
to deal a blow at the "Shepherd's Tent," a kind of school or academy
which the New Lights had set up in New London for qualifying young men
as exhorters, teachers, and ministers, the General Assembly had
decided that no persons should presume to set up any college, seminary
of learning, or any public school whatever, without special leave of
the legislature.[115] The Court had also enacted that no one should
take the benefit of the laws respecting the settlement and support of
ministers unless he were a graduate of Yale or Harvard, or some other
approved Protestant university. It had also given explicit directions
for the supervision of the schools throughout the colony and of their
masters' orthodoxy,[116] and had advised Yale to take especial care
that her students should not be contaminated by the New Lights. The
Congregationalists had reported the "Shepherd's Tent" as a noisy,
tumultuous resort, because it was occasionally used for meetings, and
had added that it was openly taught in that school that there would
soon be a change in the government, and that disobedience to the civil
laws was not wrong. The Assembly, fearing that it might "train up
youth in ill practices and principles," sought to put an end to it. As
to the advice to the college, Yale was only too eager to follow it,
and the same year expelled the saintly David Brainerd[117] for
criticising the prayers of the college preachers as lacking in
fervor. His offense was against a college law of the preceding year
which forbade students to call their officers "hypocritical, carnal or
unconverted men." The college, as the New Light movement increased,
came to the further conclusion that--

since the principal design of erecting this college was to train
up a succession of learned and orthodox ministers by whose example
people might be directed in the ways of religion and good order
... it would be a contradiction to the civil government to support
a college to educate students to trample upon their own laws, to
break up the churches which they establish and protect, especially
since the General Assembly in May 1742, thought proper to give the
governors of the college some special advice and direction upon
that account, which was to the effect that proper care should be
taken to prevent the scholars from imbibing those or like errors;
and those who would not be orderly and submissive, should not be
allowed the privileges of the college.

Solomon Paine made answer to this law. With fine irony, he assured the
people that in effect it forbade all students attending Yale College
to go to any religious meeting even with their parents, should they be
Separatists or New Lights, because--

no scholar upon the Lord's day or other day, under pretence of
religion, shall go to any public or private meeting, not
established or allowed by public authority or approved by the
President, under penalty of a fine, confession, admonition or
otherwise, according to the state and demerit of the offence, for
fear that such preaching would end in "Quakerism," open
infidelity, and the destruction of all Christian religion, and
make endless divisions in the Christian church till nothing hut
the name of it would be left in the world.

The two Cleveland brothers, John and Ebenezer, had spent the fall
vacation of 1744 [c] with their parents at their home in Canterbury,
and by request of their elders had frequented the Separatist church
there. On their return to Yale, the boys were admonished. They
professed themselves ready to apologize, but not in such words as the
authorities thought sufficiently submissive, for the latter considered
that the boys had broken the laws "of God, of the Colony and of the
College."[119] The boys very ably argued that, under the
circumstances, there had been nothing else for them to do but to go to
church with their parents when requested to do so, and held to their
position. Yale expelled them, and there followed a sensation
throughout the colony.[120]

The leaders of the New Light party in the church of Canterbury were
the nearest relatives and friends of the Cleveland boys, who came to
be regarded as martyrs to their religion. Their treatment opened the
question as to whether the steadily increasing numbers of New Lights
were to lose for their children the benefit of the college, that they
helped to support. Must they, in order to send their sons to college,
deprive them for four years of a "Gospel ministry" and lay them open
to consequent grave perils? Why should New Lights be required to make
such a sacrifice, or why, in vacation, should their children be
required to submit to the ecclesiastical laws of the college? If
Episcopalians were permitted to have their sons, students at Yale,
worship with them during the vacations, why should not the same
liberty be granted to equally good citizens who differed even less in
theological opinions?

Because of this college incident the difficulties in the Canterbury
church attracted still more attention, but the end of the schism was
at hand. In the month that witnessed the expulsion of the Clevelands,
the minority of the original First Church voted that they were "The
Church of Canterbury," and that those who had gone forth from among
them in the January of the preceding year, 1743, as Congregationalists
after the Cambridge Platform, had abrogated that of
Saybrook. Consequently, to the minority lawfully belonged the election
of the minister, the meeting house, and the taxes for ministerial
support. Having thus fortified their position, they by a later vote
declared:--

That those in the society who are differently minded from us, and
can't conscientiously join in ye settlement of Mr. James
Coggeshall as our minister may have free liberty to enjoy their
own opinion, and we are willing they should be released and
discharged from paying anything to ye support of Mr. Coggeshall,
or living under his ministry any longer than until they have
parish privileges granted them and are settled in church by
themselves according to ye order of ye Gospel, or are lawfully
released. [121]

At the repeal of the Toleration Act in 1743, a new method had been
prescribed for sober dissenters who wished to separate from the state
church, and who were not of the recognized sects. The method of
relief, thereafter, was for the dissenters, no matter how widely
scattered in the colony, to appeal in person to the General Assembly
and ask for special exemption. Moreover, they were promised only that
their requests would be listened to, and the Assembly was growing
steadily more and more averse to granting such petitions. As a result
of this policy, the Separatist church of Canterbury did not have a
very good prospect of immediate ability to accept the good-will of the
First Church, which went even farther than the resolution cited
above. The First Church offered to assist the Separatists in obtaining
recognition from the Assembly. This offer the Separatists refused,
preferring to submit to double taxation, and thus to become a standing
protest to the injustice of the laws.

After the expulsion of the Clevelands, Yale made one more pronounced
effort to discipline its students and to repress the growth of the
liberal spirit. She attempted to suppress a reprint of Locke's essay
upon "Toleration" which the senior class had secretly printed at their
expense. An attempt to overawe the students and to make them confess
on pain of expulsion was met by the spirited resistance of one of the
class, who threatened to appeal to the King in Council if his diploma
were denied him. His diploma was granted; and some years after, when
the sentiment in the colony had further changed, the college gave the
Cleveland brothers their degree.

The church in Enfield[122] had an experience somewhat similar to that
of Canterbury, to which it seems to have looked for spiritual advice
and example. The Enfield Separate church was probably organized
between 1745 and 1751, though its first known documents are a series
of letters to the Separate church in Canterbury covering the period
1751-53. These letters sought advice in adjusting difficulties that
were creating great discord in the church, which had already separated
from the original church of Enfield. In 1762, the Enfield Separatists,
once more in harmony, renewed their covenant, and called Mr. Nathaniel
Collins to be their pastor. They struggled for existence until 1769,
when they appealed to the General Assembly for exemption from the
rates still levied upon them for the benefit of the First
Society. They asked for recognition, separation, and incorporation as
the Second Society and Church of Enfield. They were refused; but in
May of the following year,--a year to be marked by special legislation
in behalf of dissenters,--the Enfield Separatists again memorialized
the Assembly, and in response were permitted to organize their own
church. [123] This permission, however, was limited to the
memorialists, eighty in number; to their children, if within six
months after reaching their majority they filed certificates of
membership in this Separate church; and to strangers, who should enter
the new society within one year of their settling in the town. The
history of the Enfield Separatists gives glimpses of the frequent
double discord between the New Lights and the Old and among the New
Lights themselves. The period of the Enfield persecution extended over
years when, elsewhere in the colony, Separatists had obtained
recognition of their claims to toleration, if only through special
acts and not by general legislation.

If churches suffered from the severe ecclesiastical laws of 1742-43,
individuals did also. Under the law which considered traveling
ministers as vagrants, and which the Assembly had made still more
stringent by the additional penalty "to pay down the cost of
transportation," so learned a man as the Rev. Samuel Finley,
afterwards president of Princeton, was imprisoned and driven from the
colony because he insisted upon preaching in Connecticut. Indeed, it
was his persistence in returning to the colony that caused the
magistrates to increase the severity of the law.[124] When the
ministers John Owen of Groton and Benjamin Pomeroy of Hebron, as well
as the itinerant James Davenport of Southold, criticised the laws, all
of them were at once arraigned for the offense before the Assembly.
There was so much excitement over the arrest of Pomeroy and Davenport
that it threatened a riot. All three men were discharged, but
Davenport was ordered out of the colony for his itinerant preaching
and for teaching resistance to the civil laws. Pomeroy, his friend,
had declared that the laws forbade any faithful minister, or any one
faithful in civil authority, to hold office. Events bore out his
statement, for ministers were hounded, and the New Light justices of
the peace, and other magistrates, were deprived of office. Pomeroy,
himself, was discharged only to be complained of for irregular
preaching at Colchester and in punishment to be,deprived of his salary
for seven years.[125] The Rev. Nathan Stone of Stonington was
disciplined for his New Light sympathies. Philemon Bobbins of Branford
was deposed for preaching to the Baptists at Wallingford. This last
procedure was the work of the Consociation of New Haven county, which
thereby began a six years' contest, 1741-47, with the Branford
church. In 1745 this church attempted to throw off the yoke of the
Consociation by renouncing the Saybrook Platform.

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