Indeed, the intolerance shown towards dissenters was by this time not so much sectarian, not so much a lack of tolerance toward slightly varying fundamentals of faith, form of worship, and organization, as an intolerance based upon the conviction that the body politic must be protected by a state church. There was, of course, a little of the exasperating sense of superiority in belonging to the favored Establishment. The old objection to dissent as heresy--as a sin for which the community was responsible--had for the most part given way to opposition to it as introducing a system of voluntary contributions for the support of religion. And there was a very general and well-defined fear that such a support would prove inadequate. If so, deterioration of the state and of its people would follow. For individual worth and character, many among the dissenters were highly respected, and the great body of them were esteemed good citizens. Among the churches, some few of the established ones were beginning to have their own services occasionally conducted by dissenting ministers. The First Society of Canterbury entered a vote to this effect in 1791. As the churches translated more liberally the Articles of the Saybrook Platform, they approached a polity more in common with that of Separatist and Baptist. By 1800, the teachings of John Wise of Ipswich, reinforced by those of Nathaniel Emmons, "the father of modern Congregationalism," had permeated all New England. Wise, in his efforts to revive the independence of the single churches, had exploded the Barrowism which New England usage had introduced into original Congregationalism, and the rebound had carried the churches as far beyond the Cambridge Platform towards original Brownism as the Presbyterian movement had carried their polity away from the Cambridge instrument. The later Edwardean school had devoted itself to the discussion of doctrine rather than to polity, and, in the alliance with Presbyterianism outside of Connecticut, it had affiliated without attaching much weight to differences in church government. Their common interest, at first, was to unite against a possible supremacy of the Church of England, and against the danger to their own churches and to good government from the increase of dissenters. Later, their united efforts were directed to forwarding Christian missions in order that the gospel might not be left out of the civilization on the frontier. In this later work, they had competitors as soon as the Baptists and Methodists became strongly organized bodies. Accordingly Presbyterians and Congregationalists still further sank their differences of discipline in the Plan of Union of 1801, formed for the furtherance of the mission work. Thus it was many years before questions of polity again took front rank in the Congregational churches. Already their very indifference to it, the long years of the gradual abandonment of the Saybrook system, together with the