In the spirit of such legislation, the Court advised the Hartford church to "walk apart." The advice was accepted, the church divided, and the members who went out reorganized as the Second Church of Hartford. Other discordant churches quickly followed this example. The Second Church of Hartford immediately put forth a declaration, asserting that its Congregationalism was that of the old original New England type. The force of public opinion was so great, however, that despite its declaration, the Second Church began at once to accept the Half-Way Covenant. "The only result of their profession was to give a momentary name to the struggle as between Congregationalist and Presbyterian." [45] It was no effective opposition to the onward development in Connecticut of the new order. When the churches found that neither the old nor the new way was to be insisted upon, the violence of faction ceased. The dual membership was accepted. For a while, its line of cleavage away from the old system, with its local church "as a covenanted brotherhood of souls renewed by the experience of God's grace," was not realized, any more than that the new system was merging the older type of church "into the parish where all persons of good moral character, living within the parochial bounds, were to have, as in England and Scotland, the privilege of baptism for their households and of access to the Lord's table."[46] Another move in this direction was taken when the splitting off of churches, and the forming of more than one within the original parish bounds, necessitated a further departure from the principles of Congregationalism, and when the sequestration of lands for the benefit of clergy became a feature of the new order.[47] In this formation of new churches, the oldest parish was always the First Society.[ai] Those formed later did not destroy it or affect its antecedent agreements.[48] Only sixty-six years had passed (1603-1669) since the publication of the "Points of Difference" between the Separatists, the London-Amsterdam exiles, and the Church of England, wherein insistence had been laid upon the principles of a covenanted church, of its voluntary support, and of the unrighteousness of churches possessing either lands or revenue. The pendulum had swung from the broad democracy and large liberty of Brownism through Barrowism, past the Cambridge Platform (almost the centre of its arc), and on through the Half-Way Covenant to the beginning of a parish system. It had still farther to swing before it reached the end of the arc, marked by the Saybrook Platform, and before it began its slower return movement, to rest at last in the Congregationalism of the past seventy years. FOOTNOTES: