A History of American ChristianityBacon, Leonard Woolsey
Religion
A History of American Christianity
Bacon, Leonard Woolsey
United States -- Church history; United States -- Religion
The immediate sequel of this transaction is characteristic and
instructive. Two brothers, John and Samuel Browne, members of the
council of the colony, took grave offense at this departure from the
ways of the Church of England, and, joining to themselves others
like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book of Common
Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic
procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers,
"were Separatists, and would be Anabaptists." The two brothers were
illogical. The ministers had not departed from the Nationalist and
anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson from the quarter-deck
of the "Talbot." What they had just done was to lay the foundations of a
national church for the commonwealth that was in building. And the two
brothers, trying to draw off a part of the people into their
schism-shop, were Separatists, although they were doubtless surprised to
discover it. There was not the slightest hesitation on the governor's
part as to the proper course to be pursued. "Finding those two brothers
to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices tending to
mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place
for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at
the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor
afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England
settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the
wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company.
There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing
in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly
self-evident as to need no argument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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