A far more profound opponent of ecclesiastical aristocracy was the Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich. He belongs to that illustrious minority which stood out against the witchcraft delusion. Fined and imprisoned upon one occasion for leading his town to refuse the collection of taxes not imposed by a representative assembly, he was a proper man to declare that "power is originally in the people." As men are "all naturally free and equal," civil government "is the effect of human free-compacts and not of divine instigation." And "if Christ has settled any form of power in his Church he has done it for the benefit of every member. Then he must needs be presumed to have made choice of that government as should least expose the people to hazard, either from fraud, or arbitrary measures of particular men. And it is as plain as daylight, there is no species of government like a democracy to attain this end." So argued the Ipswich preacher in 1717. Fifty years later, his _Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches_, too radical for his own day, was seen to be the very thing needed; in 1772, when "consociation" had broken down even in Connecticut, when Anglicanism was associated in men's minds with royal oppression, and when political and religious liberty seemed destined to stand or fall together, then the work of John Wise was reprinted and two editions were exhausted within the year. Accompanying the endeavor to find a common theoretical basis for Church and State was the disposition to apply a common test to public and private conduct. Rousseau voiced one of the strongest convictions of his age when he said that "those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the other." With the decay of creeds, true religion was thought by many to be inseparable from civic virtue, while political philosophy, preaching the regeneration of an "artificial" society by returning to the simple life of nature, was often conceived with an emotional fervor which raised civic duties to the level of religious rites. In America, long before Rousseau startled the world with his paradoxes, men who could not agree on creeds or forms of government found common ground in thinking that the test of true religion was that it made good citizens, the test of rightly ordered society that it made good men. In the early letters of John Adams we may note how one man's mind was won to this new ideal. "There is a story about town," he writes to Charles Cushing, "that I am an Arminian." Time was when such a rumor would have been too serious to be reported, without comment, in the postscript of a long letter. In 1756, even this young candidate for the ministry felt that such issues were becoming remote and unreal. He but voiced the growing discontent when he asked, "where do we find a precept in the gospel requiring ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole