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
It followed that while many of the newcomers in the colonies were
indifferent to religion, by far the larger number were not, and
thought that, as they had been members of the English Established
Church, they ought to be admitted into full membership in the churches
of England's colonies. They felt, moreover, that the religious
training of their children was being neglected because the New England
churches ignored the child whose parents would not, or could not,
submit to their terms of membership. Still more strongly did these
people feel neglected and dissatisfied when, as the years went by,
more and more of them were emigrants who had been acceptable members
of the Puritan churches in England. They continued to be refused
religious privileges because New England Congregationalism doubted the
scriptural validity of letters of dismissal from churches where the
discipline and church order varied from its own. Within the membership
of the New England churches themselves, there was great uncertainty
concerning several church privileges, as, for instance, how far infant
baptism carried with it participation in church sacraments, and
whether adults, baptized in infancy, who had failed to unite with the
church by signing the Covenant, could have their children baptized
into the church. Considerations of church-membership and baptism, for
which the Cambridge Synod of 1648 was summoned, were destined, because
of political events in England, to be thrust aside and to wait another
eight years for their solution in that conference which framed the
Half-Way Covenant as supplementary to the Cambridge Platform of faith
and discipline.
What has been termed the Anglo-colonial cause for summoning the
Cambridge Synod finds explanation in the frequent questions and
demands which English Independency put to the New England churches
concerning church usage and discipline, and in the intense interest
with which New England waited the outcome of the constitutional
struggle in England between King and Parliament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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