were living in the towns near Scituate,39 in the region at the base of the cape around Barnstable and Yarmouth,40 on the adjacent islands,11 in all the little settlements on both sides of the Acushnet river,42 while in even greater numbers they lined the shore of Narragansett bay. It has been estimated that there were three thousand within the limits of old Plymouth Colony and that one-third of the Piscataqua region was Quaker.43

Before 1702 there were eight monthly meetings for business in New England. These were the meeting of Greenwich, covering the Narragansett country; of Rhode Island, which included Tiverton and Little Compton; of Dartmouth; of Sandwich, embracing Falmouth and Yarmouth; of Pembroke, which included Scituate, Marshfield and Duxbury; of Salem; of Hampton; and of Dover. These monthly meetings were not long in grouping to form the quarterly meetings in which bodies the Friends did a large share of their most important work. The monthly meetings of Barnstable and Plymouth counties made up the Sandwich and Scituate Quarterly Meeting. Dartmouth and Rhode Island Monthly Meetings joined Greenwich to form the Rhode Island Quarterly, while all the northern towns, whether in Massachusetts proper, New Hampshire, or Maine, united in 1705 to make up the Salem Quarterly Meeting and to this the Boston Friends likewise belonged. This centralized organization was completed

44

39 Ibid., 39, 45.

40 Ibid., 22, 39, 45; Fothergill, Life and Travels, 40.

41 Chalkley, Journal, 19, 39; Bownas, Life and Travels, 120. 42 Chalkley, Journal, 39, 45.

43 Jones, Quakers, XV. Keith was underrating the Quaker strength in Massachusetts, with a view to encouraging the authorities who had sent him to lead the Quakers from their error, when he wrote, "Few Quakers are at Boston. There are some at Sandwich, some at Piscataway and others scattered Places, but very few." Prot. Episc. Hist. Soc. Colls., I, xii.

44 Jones, Quakers, 141, note 2; 142, note 1; Moses Brown Papers, XVIII, 55; N. E. Yr. M., passim; A Brief Account of the Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England, with the Subordinate Meetings of which it is composed, 11-22.

in the New England Yearly Meeting, occurring every June on Rhode Island, and attended by representatives from all the Quaker towns and villages who flocked to Rhode Island in great numbers. As a business meeting its importance can hardly be overestimated, for by making the local problems of all parts of two governments a matter for group consideration, it effected results for scattered hamlets which could never have been secured by anything but united efforts. The corresponding organization in England was no more thoro in this regard.

During the years of this development in the organization of New England Quakerism, there had come a decided reaction from that spirit of intolerant hatred which had been shown toward the first comers. Prejudice had lessened but little in the forty years since Quakerism first appeared in Massachusetts; but New England orthodoxy was learning that the Society of Friends was not advocating the practices of Münster in spite of the extremes to which some of the fanatics had resorted in days gone by. That tendency among the more ignorant of the first converts which the New England Yearly Meeting styled "ranterism" had existed in the earlier days but was rapidly disappearing. 45 Frowned on from the first by the better social class among the Friends, it became less and less conspicuous until little ground for complaint on this score might be found.46 In

45 Jones, Quakers, 113. "The old spirit and Principle of ye ranters the Lord hath brought down in these parts, Truth having Gained ye victory over them, so yt we meet with little opposition from them." Epistle to Lond. Yr. M., 1699, Epistles Rec'd, I, 301; Lond. Yr. M., II, 302; "Aaron Atkinson's account of his Travels in America," Lond. Yr. M., II, 313.

46 The memorial of the Massachusetts government in respect to Quaker grievances in 1708 said, "nor are those that go Under the Denomination of Quakers now such as were then [17th century], who were some of them Open bold Disturbers of the Publick Peace and their Principles notoriously known to be Heretical, but are much refined both in principles and Conversation." Mass. Archives, XI, 279-280. Four years later the New England Yearly Meeting was writing to the London Friends, “our Yearly meeting hath been Very Large, and Through the great Love and Contineued flavor of ouer gratious God and Heavenly ffather, wee have

all its early history Quakerism suffered seriously on both sides of the Atlantic from a failure on the part of its adversaries to appreciate the teachings of George Fox and his followers. It was the inevitable lack of sympathy between the mystic and the religious traditionalist, the latter represented by New England Puritan as well as by English Churchman. To the English clergy and to the New England ministers the doctrine of the inner light and the Quaker treatment of the Bible were nothing less than the overthrowing of the Scriptures as the source of authority, with the substitution of the all sufficiency of the light within. Yet more sacrilegious was the denial of the efficacy of Christ's life and death, the inner light again becoming all important and acting as a substitute for the atonement. The emphasis of the Church of England was on the sacraments, of the Puritan on the Bible. The Quaker in breaking away from the absolute necessity of either was, therefore, it seemed to both schools of theologians, not merely heretical but actually non-Christian. With increasing knowledge and a better appreciation of the Quaker's creed and purposes a far kinder spirit was awakened, while in the meantime the industry and piety of the individual Friend was beginning to make an impression which was bound to have visible results before many years had elapsed.

Enioyed the Same without aney Disturbance; Ye Spirit of Ranterism which formerly Interrupted our-Quiett and peaceable assemblies being well Extingueshed." N. E. Yr. M., 72; Lond. Yr. M., IV, 326.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SYSTEM IN PRACTICE.

Between the inauguration of royal government in Massachusetts and the first legal confession that the Congregational church-state system was weakening and forced to make concessions, there were just thirty-six years. In this period various forces were struggling together. On the one hand appeared seventeenth century Calvinism, still guiding creed and platform, but troubled by what appeared to be the degeneracy of the times, a falling away from the fervent piety of the earlier generation. On the other hand there loomed large the spirit of persistent opposition to authority in matters ecclesiastical which was at last to make its impression because of changes that were at the time working within. These thirty-six years saw two failures of the clergy to secure governmental sanction for the holding of a synod; it saw the death of the elder Mather; it saw also the beginnings of the Anglican movement in New England and its support by the royal governors; and it saw the persistent increase in the number of Quaker and Baptist meetings which finally brought about the first exemption laws in their favor. It is for these reasons that the first quarter century under the province charter was conspicuously transitional, and yet, in the first twenty years at least, it represented the highest point which the Massachusetts church-state system reached, so far as detailed legislation and the execution of effective measures were concerned. In the colonial period the name "theocracy" best expressed the nature of the government; in the early provincial period there existed the anomaly of an enterprising royal province executing laws which maintained the shell of a weakening ecclesiasticism, the glory and fervor of which had departed. Yet another century had to pass before the system was allowed to expire and

the opposing elements were at this time only beginning to organize. On the threshold then of new adjustments in the old order, that system can best be examined, for those first adjustments made changes that greatly altered the whole legal procedure in ecclesiastical affairs. The foundation of the system was the passage of the first laws under the charter for maintaining religion; its opposing elements were the inward declination from standards of former days and the pressure from without of new hostile forces.

The strong feeling of particularism which the first churches of Plymouth Colony transmitted to the more Presbyterianly inclined meetings of the Bay had had its effect in producing a church establishment in which the central government was at first little more than a source of authority, shifting all the execution of its ecclesiastical laws upon the individual towns. The provincial assembly, having ordered that each town be provided with a minister, put it into the hands of that town and its church to procure him and bargain with him; likewise the assembly, having ordered that he be maintained, left it with each town to assess and collect the taxes therefor. A little later the county court began to play an important part in supervising the towns. Only when difficulties ensued did the General Court appear on the scene of action, acting as court of high appeal or giving advice to contending parties. This was the marked tendency of the last of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth century, and shows clearly in what direction matters were traveling. The orthodox towns were tending more and more to rely on central authority, while nothing short of rigorous action on the part of the government could maintain in the whole province the conditions which had been the natural expression of the religious views of the first comers. To get any idea of the actual working of the Massachusetts churchstate system and of the position which the General Court came to occupy in ecclesiastical affairs, it is necessary to study local conditions; and this study will be far from perfect because of the nature of the material upon which it must be founded.