while not receiving systematic, organized help from aļ parent group abroad, were so united and so rigid that for a long time they were able to deny any concessions.

Altho the New England nonconformists were not receiving direct aid from the dissenting bodies in England they were supported indirectly by William's government. The Massachusetts province charter itself indicated the extent to which sympathy might be expected from this Dutch Protestant ruler who was frankly disappointed in the failure of the comprehension bill and in his inability to do better for the English nonconformists than to secure the Toleration Act. The new charter, the work of Increase Mather, under the authority of William, specified that liberty of conscience should be allowed throughout the province, and no special recognition of the Church of England was demanded. It failed therefore to support the encroachments of Episcopacy which had appeared in the previous decade, aided by Randolph and Andros. The next few years saw the allowance by the king in council of Massachusetts legislation which practically renewed the ecclesiastical system of the seventeenth century. While to a certain extent continuing the methods of the Stuarts in dealing with political and economic problems in New England, William was not ready to make great use of the English Church as an agent in accomplishing his object.

The opposition to the established church of Massachusetts which had been opened by the intruders of the midseventeenth century was renewed soon after 1691 and now had an altered basis for attack in the terms of the new charter. The Quakers were the first to enter the conflict, drafting appeals to the governor and to the Friends of London before the S. P. G. had even been organized. They were regularly supported by the Baptist churches of the province, but the assistance thus given them was meager, as the Baptists were not a numerous sect in New England until after the religious revival of the middle of the century known as the Great Awakening. The Anglican invasion of Massachusetts, pushed forward after the founding of

1

the S. P. G., was an important factor in the progress toward the new era, but was less effective than the Quaker movement for reasons that will appear. The work of Anglican and Quaker, while slow and difficult, was aided by the low condition of spiritual vitality which New England experienced in the years immediately preceding the Great Awakening. The very absence of spiritual vigor demanded many laws to enforce customs which were now tending to lapse, as the people were no longer interested in maintaining the old standards. The elaborate ecclesiastical structure reared in order to meet the situation was artificial, and had no strength of its own to resist continued pressure upon it.

The nature of this artificial structure and the scheme of attack made against it by outside forces will be treated in the following discussion. As a study of institutions it places some emphasis upon the actual constitution of the Massachusetts church town at the highest point of its development and just before its disintegration began. As a study of English influence on colonial life it pays some attention to the political and religious forces at work in England to show what part they played in the events which occurred in Massachusetts.

CHAPTER II.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL SYSTEM OF PROVINCIAL

MASSACHUSETTS.

The province of Massachusetts Bay offers an unusual field for the study of contending religious forces in America in the early eighteenth century. Against a stronghold of rigid church establishment, in the hands of nonconformists, two religious bodies, Anglican and Quaker, contended for years with little apparent effect but with ultimate success. In so doing they gradually broke down the Massachusetts ecclesiastical system which had come into being in the seventeenth century, had withstood the attacks of Antinomians, Baptists and early Quakers, had lapsed during the Andros regime but was later revived under the province charter. In elaborateness of detail and rigid formality the system reached its highest development in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in the years when organized attacks upon it caused it to draw its mantle of exclusiveness more closely, and before the attacking forces had begun to gain their demands. It was, therefore, under the provincial government and not during the colonial period that this eminence was attained, a fact surprising in view of the many ways in which the province charter created a new era.

Postponing for the moment a consideration of the structure of the Massachusetts system as it was formed in the seventeenth century and hardened in the early eighteenth, let us examine the status of the man who did not sympathize with the existing order in the period before the provincial government. Perfect sympathy, as expressed in church membership, was required as a qualification for admission to the privileges of the body politic under the first charter, and an increasing majority of the inhabitants

of the colony were thus excluded from the franchise in spite of the results of the half-way covenant. Actual hostility, such as appeared in the views of certain dissenting sects which had crept in, was the attitude which the persecuting laws of the seventeenth century were framed to meet. Permitted more and more to lapse, these laws became a dead letter with the abrogation of the charter and under the governments which immediately succeeded. In the commission by which James II constituted a president and council for Massachusetts Bay, a "liberty of conscience" was ordered to "be allowed unto all persons," the Church of England to be "particularly countenanced and encouraged." While the Churchmen of Boston, under the leadership of Randolph and Mason, the only Anglicans on the council, failed to make hoped-for headway, the New England Quakers were recording their appreciation of the changed conditions when they met in the summer of 1686. "We enjoy outward Peace at present," they wrote to the London Yearly Meeting, "the parsecuting spirits being under contemp themselves, and much awed by the present Power in England, so that we enjoy our Meetings Peaceably." The injunctions issued to Dudley, when repeated in the Andros commission,3 resulted in very unusual concessions which were allowed to both of these hostile bodies. The progress which was made by the Episcopal group in Boston was among the causes of the attempt to regain the charter, as well as of the revolt against authority in 1689; the other religious sects were well satisfied in finding

15 Mass. Hist. Colls., IX, 150.

2Epistles Received, I, 19. A letter written to London later in the same year expresses more strikingly the same idea. "Them that were secure and had made their nests in the Stars, are now in some measure brought to the Dust; their Dagon is fallen, and their Arke is taken, And now are crying whose sorrows are like ours: This we see is the Lords doings, and it appears Marvellous to many, that in the Bloody Town of Boston, and other places where Friends were a hising and by work among them: have now Equal privilege with their persecutors, by reason of the Kings indulgence for Liberty of Conscience." Ibid., I, 21.

33 Mass. Hist. Colls., VII, 147-148.

themselves for the time being relieved from taxation for the support of the Congregational system.1

While the towns in general went back to their former methods when the old order was resumed in 1689, its basis was entirely altered when the new charter went into effect two years later. Provisions regarding the relation of church and state are conspicuously lacking in this document, and because no special prohibition was there laid down it was possible for the General Court to renew the ecclesiastical framework of the seventeenth century without exceeding the law. The only limitation appeared in a clause which stated that

for the greater Ease and Encouragement of Our Loveing Subjects Inhabiting our said Province or Territory of the Massachusetts Bay and of such as come to Inhabit there Wee doe by these presents for Our heires and Successors Grant Establish and Ordaine that for ever hereafter there shall be a liberty of Conscience allowed in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists) Inhabiting or which shall inhabit or be resident within our said Province or Territory.5

Later controversy raised a storm over the meaning of "liberty of conscience . . . in the Worshipp of God." Examined in the light of events in England at the opening of William's reign and of conditions prevailing in Massachusetts during the years of the Dominion of New England, the meaning is obvious. As an echo of the Toleration Act the province charter was attempting to bring the nonconformists of New England a full assurance that they should suffer no interference in their method of worship by the state church of England. It was therefore in accordance with one of the special requests submitted by Increase Mather. Further than this it gave assurance to the several dissenting sects in Massachusetts that the general tol

The London Yearly Meeting, recognizing the opportunity afforded by the appointment of Andros, had urged the New England Quakers to appeal to him, and the latter answered with the report that upon application he "has taken off that oppression and Yoak that Friends were under for Maintenance of Ministers so called: And Friends have a good Interest in him and he is very kind & Curteous to us." Epistles Received, I, 58-59. See also Palfrey, New England, III, 522. A Quaker petition bearing on this matter in an individual case appears in Mass. Archives, XI, 40. Mass. Prov. Laws, I, 14..