The Development of Religious Liberty in ConnecticutGreene, M. Louise (Maria Louise)
History
The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut
Greene, M. Louise (Maria Louise)
Connecticut -- Church history
The proviso of the Saybrook Platform had arranged for the continued
existence of churches, Congregational rather than Presbyterian in
their interpretation of that platform; yet, as late as 1730, when but
few remained, the question had arisen whether members of such
churches, "since they were allowed and under the protection of the
laws," ought to qualify according to the Toleration Act. The Court
decided in the negative, [101] arguing that, although they differed
from the majority of the churches in preferring the Cambridge Platform
of church discipline, they had been permitted under the colony law of
May 13, 1669, establishing the Congregational church, and had been
protected by the proviso of 1708. The Court in its decision of 1730
seems also to have included a very few churches that had revolted from
the religious formalism creeping in under the Saybrook system, and
that had returned to the earlier type of Congregationalism. After the
Great Awakening, churches "thus allowed and under the protection of
our laws" were found to increase so rapidly that the movement away
from the Saybrook Platform threatened to undermine the ecclesiastical
system, and to endanger the Establishment. Seeing this, the Court, or
General Assembly,[a] began to enforce the old colony law that with it
alone belonged the power to approve the incorporating of churches. And
shortly after it began to harass these separating churches, and to
enact laws to prevent the farther spread of reinvigorated
Congregationalism unless of the Presbyterian type. Soon after 1741,
the churches that drew away from the Saybrook system of government
became known as Separate churches, and their members as
Separatists. When these people found that the Assembly would no longer
approve their organizing as churches, they attempted, as sober
dissenters from the worship established in the colony, to take the
benefit of the Toleration Act. The Assembly next "resolved that those
commonly called Presbyterians or Congregationalists should not take
the benefit of that Act." [102]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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