Nothing is here said of the Presbyterians, or of any other sect, yet that denomination was sure to receive the greater benefit under the working of the law. They were a wealthy body, and in the next year, they began, under the General Association of Connecticut, to renew their earlier efforts for an organized planting of missions. Attempts to establish missionary posts were begun as early as 1774, but they had been interrupted by the war, and were not revived until 1780, when two missionaries were sent to Vermont. After a little, the missionary spirit languished through lack of support; but interest had been roused again by the promised lands and money from the sales in the Western Reserve, and by the contributions that, flowing in from 1788 to 1791, warranted the dispatch of missionaries into the western field in 1792, and regularly thereafter. [178] Turning to the religious and more strictly theological side of the development of toleration, there was within the Establishment itself a gradual modification of opinion concerning membership. It was witnessed to by the contents of a book entitled "Christian Forbearance to Weak Consciences a Duty of the Gospel," by John Lewis of Stepney parish, Wethersfield. It was sent out in 1789 for the purpose of "Attempting to prove that Persons, absenting themselves from the Lord's Table, through honest scruples of Conscience, is not such a breach of Covenant but that they partake other Privileges." One may recall that twenty years previous, 1769-71, Dr. Bellamy was thundering not only against the Half-Way Covenant, but also against the Stoddardean view of the Lord's Supper as a "means" of grace,--as a sacrament the partaking of which would help unworthy or unconverted men to conversion and to the leading of moral and holy lives. One might, for a moment, anticipate that the Wethersfield pastor was harking back to the old idea. But this was not his point of view. "I reprobate," he writes,"the idea of a Half-Way Covenant, or sealing of such a covenant." [179] Lewis contended that all seekers after holiness were to enter the church through the "very same covenant," but that to all of them were to be extended the same and all church privileges, and that they were to accept them "as far as in their conscience they can see their way clear, hoping for further light." If they could accept baptism and church oversight, and could not, because of honest scruples of conscience (lest they were not worthy), approach the Lord's Table, they were not for that reason to be considered reprobates. As to such charity opening a way for persons of immoral lives to creep into the churches or to put off willfully the partaking of communion, the author's experience of many years had proved the contrary, though he could not deny that the possibility of hypocrisy and backsliding might exist under any form of membership.