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"to recover and establish the faith and order of the gospel." This desire, true to the old institution which subjected the Church to the civil power, was by the hand of Cotton Mather submitted to the legislature. There it caused trouble. The council assented, but the house hesitated and postponed decision for a year, to give "opportunity for instructions from the people." During the year news of the movement reached England and excited the opposition of the bishop of London, who seems to have taken for granted that there was some plot against the newly enfranchised Episcopalians. Through his influence the king's government reprimanded both the legislature and the ministers, and forbade the synod, “as a bad precedent for dissenters." 1

No event of the time could more strikingly illustrate the change of conditions. While the clergy by their application to the legislature remained faithful to the principle of the theocracy, the hesitation of that body was evidence of weakening regard for the principle on the civil side. At the same time, the quiet submission of both legislature and clergy to the uncalled-for interference of the bishop of London and the peremptory orders of the king, in a matter which really concerned neither of them, is another token of lost vigor in the Puritan attitude. We cannot conceive of the clergy or general court consenting to any such dictation, fifty years before. Still another feature of the incident is the repetition of the assumption that the English Church had acquired superior place in the colony. In the English view, the allowance of one Episcopal Church in Boston turned the established Church of Massachusetts into a congregation of dissenters!

To men of our day it seems strange that the clergy failed to insist upon their desire, or to hold their synod without the permission of the civil power. All accounts agree that there was great need of some influence to counteract the prevailing religious indifference of the time. But for this failure two reasons obtained. One, already hinted, was that relic of the

1 Bancroft, United States, III, 391; Palfrey, III, 420.

theocracy which made the magistrate's summons the only warrant for a Church synod. The Church as yet had not come to an understanding of its own natural autonomy. The other, and as powerful, reason was the loss of prestige and power suffered by the ministers as a class. They no longer possessed that wide influence and authority, which in previous generations had made them almost the virtual rulers of the commonwealth. This fact was due, partly to the growing consciousness that theocratic institutions were not fitted to modern life; partly to the increasing numbers of those people who acknowledged no Church bonds; and partly, perhaps chiefly, to the course pursued by the ministers themselves in certain past crises.

Cotton Mather, writing of a former condition which he would admire to have renewed in his own time, said: "New England being a country whose interests are remarkably inwrapped in ecclesiastical circumstances, ministers ought to concern themselves in politics." In the early day this ministerial concern in politics was so intimate and influential that the voice of the clergy was often the most powerful in the community, at times even coercing magistrates and courts to its dictation. But the power was abused and on occasion became the instrument of cruel bigotry and superstition. Every case of religious persecution was laid at the door of the clergy, and many times justly. They were held chiefly accountable for the severer inflictions, for the whipping of Holmes and the hanging of Quakers.2 When in the frenzied crusade against the Salem witches the ministers were found pitiless, urging on the magistrates who had begun to feel compassion, the popular sentiment of humanity was outraged, and the revolt against the spiritual authority of the ministerial order became wide and permanent.3

1 Quoted by Bancroft, United States, III, 74.

2 Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts, p. 176.

Hutchinson preserves a letter from William Arnold of Rhode Island to the governor of Massachusetts, which, though written long before the time of

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The ministers never recovered from this self-dealt blow, and thereafter what a minister said and did was estimated at its intrinsic value, and not endowed with superior influence and authority by reason of his office.1

Thus was completed the breaking down of the religious commonwealth in Massachusetts, and the state made ready for that complete severance from the Church which, both as an incident and consequent, accompanied the Revolution and National Independence.

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The founding of Connecticut was a protest against the ecclesiasticism of Massachusetts.2 Though the younger colony insisted on the power and duty of the magistrate to care for religion and the Church, it never attempted to set up a theocracy, and never conditioned civil and political privileges upon personal relation to the Church, save as respected the one office of governor.

The first movements of foundation were under the lead of the younger Winthrop and Hooker, though each acted quite distinctly from the other, and in different parts of the colony that was to be. The former's first service was of a military character, noted here only because his action brought into existence a name of prominence in the ecclesiastical history of Connecticut.

It needs to be premised that the Dutch at New Amsterdam had already established, though not without objection from

the Salem tragedy, but with evident allusion to the law on witchcraft, antici-
pates a sentiment common at the date of that awful frenzy. Referring to
certain enemies of Massachusetts and her policy, he describes them as
66 cry-
ing out much against them that putteth people to death for witches; for, say
they, there be no other witches upon earth nor devils, but your own pastors
and ministers and such as they are." (Hutchinson, Collections, p. 238.)
1 Von Holst, Constitutional History of United States, II, 227 et seq.;
IV, 407.

2 Palfrey, History of New England, I, 178–181.

Massachusetts, a fort and trading-post on the Connecticut River at Hartford. To this locality the Puritans of the Bay laid claim, while for the lands lying on Long Island Sound the king had given a patent to Lord Brooke and Lord Say Saybrook. and Sele. In 1634 it came to the knowledge of these patentees that the Dutch Van Twiller was about to send an expedition to strengthen the Dutch hold on the river, and to take possession of its mouth. To meet this effort they fitted out an opposing force, with the aid of the Massachusetts authorities, and put the younger Winthrop in command. He was Winthrop not a man of military training or of subsequent military life, but on this occasion succeeded as well as could any soldier. Approaching by sea, he reached the mouth of the Connecticut in "the nick of time," when the ships of Van Twiller were almost in sight. He landed, took possession of the Point on the west side, built a fort, and named the spot "Saybrooke." 1 So were the Dutch shut out from the heart of New England, and a name was coined which was destined to have large place in the New England Churches. As for Winthrop himself, he returned to Boston. Twenty years after he cast his lot with the new colony of Connecticut, to become for many years its governor, and to guide its fortunes with a sagacity and prudence not far surpassed by the like virtues of his father in the government at the Bay.

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About the same time with Winthrop's expedition, the moral impulses which resulted in the founding of Connecticut were at work in the mind and heart. the broad mind and tenderly Christian heart—of Thomas Hooker. A man of Hooker. station, education, and refinement, and a sincere Puritan in his dissent from the "irregularities" of the Church of England, he had experienced such persecution at the hands of Laud that he fled to Holland. In 1633 he came to Boston in the ship Griffin, together with John Cotton, and made so favorable an impression on the minds of the people that, very

1 Palfrey credits the coinage of this name to Fenwick. (Compendious History of New England, I, 235.)

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soon after arrival, he was chosen pastor of the Church at Newtown (Cambridge). Of him, at the time of his death in 1647, the elder Winthrop wrote in his Journal: "Who, for piety, prudence, wisdom, zeal, learning, and what else might make him serviceable in the place and time he lived in, might be compared with men of greatest note; and he shall need no other praise: the fruits of his labors in both Englands shall preserve an honorable and happy remembrance of him forever."

To Hooker, though for the most part in happy concord with his brethren of the Bay, two features of the Massachusetts policy were ungrateful: its restriction of the suffrage, and its spirit of intolerance toward all difference of opinion. His views on the former point made the great difference between him and Winthrop; for, as to the latter, it is quite clear that, had Winthrop been untrammelled by the narrow prejudices of his associates, the early annals of the colony would have recorded few instances of oppression. Hooker never assented to the rule which made membership in the Church a condition tizenship. of citizenship. He had no sympathy for the theocratic ideal. To his mind it involved a serious peril to the purity of the Church and gross wrong to a very large portion of the community. Where Winthrop argued for the limited franchise that, "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser; " Hooker answered, "in matters which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole." His was the first voice raised in New England for a pure democracy, and, as the result proved, there were many in early Massachusetts to follow his lead.

He had equally positive convictions on the question of ›leration. toleration for religious differences. Such men as Dudley and Ward were an offence to him. He looked with disapproval on the harsh measures of the general court against Williams 1 Fiske, Beginnings of New England, p. 124.

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