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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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.

[b] "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.

[i] 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 L500,000 to L800,000. [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.

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