diction to manage their own affairs. We find, indeed, that by the organic law of the "combination" of towns under a common government, it was "agreed and concluded" that the General Court "shall with all care and diligence provide for the maintenance of the purity of religion, and shall suppress the contrary, according to their best light from the word of God, and all wholesome and sound advice which shall be given by the elders and churches in the jurisdiction, so far as may concern their civil power to deal therein."* But in the code of the river colony, it is more explicitly, and more sweepingly, "ordered and decreed," that "the civil authority here established hath power and liberty to see the peace ordinances and rules of Christ be observed in every church, according to his word; as also to deal with any church member in a way of civil justice, notwithstanding any church relation, office, or interest, so it be done in a civil and not in an ecclesiastical way: nor shall any church censure, degrade, or depose any man from any civil dignity, office, or authority he shall have in the commonwealth."† Observe the difference. In both colonies, there is conceded to the State a certain guardianship over religious interests, but differently defined. In New Haven, it is made the duty of the General Court to protect the great interest of pure Christianity, not only seeking "light from the word of God,”—the rule in all proceedings, but also considering "all wholesome and sound advice" from "the elders and churches in the jurisdiction." In the river colony, on the other hand, there is another theory of what the State may do in church affairs. "The civil authority here established," hath power and liberty not only "to deal with any church member in a way of civil justice," nor only to provide that no church censure shall have any civil effect or consequence; but also to superintend the churches as such in their administration of their own affairs and to see that "every church" observes "the ordinances and rules of Christ;"-and the power of determining finally and without appeal what are "the ordinances and rules of Christ according to his word," is not left in the churches, each reading and *N. H. Col. Records, i, 115. † Conn. Col. Records, i, 524, 525.

interpreting for itself, but is lodged, unequivocally, in the civil authority, quite independently of "wholesome and sound advice" from any quarter. How this responsibility of the churches to "the civil authority" was understood in the Connecticut of those days is abundantly illustrated from the records of that colony.

As early as 1644, an excommunicated member of the church in Hartford brings his petition to the General Court for relief; and instead of being informed that no civil authority is competent to such a business, he is told "that he ought to bring into the court the particulars of his accusation that the church of Hartford may give answer thereto."* Such, at that time, "was the relation of the Congregational churches of Connecticut to civil government," that the Hartford church, with Thomas Hooker for pastor, and Samuel Stone for teacher, was made defendant in a civil court on an appeal from its censure of excommunication. Just such tutelage of the churches by the civil authority marks the history of Connecticut for more than a hundred years from its beginning. Church difficulties seem to have come, almost as a matter of course, under the cognizance of the General Court; and Queen Elizabeth herself, in her time, could hardly have been Supreme Head of the Church of England, more completely than that General Court assumed to be supreme over all the churches within its territorial jurisdiction. The semi-Erastian episcopate of the civil authority over the churches collectively, and over every church particularly, was constantly pernicious.

Wethersfield had its church quarrel which seems to have been aggravated by civil interference till it rent the town asunder. Windsor had its church quarrel, and the General Court meddled and mediated to no good end. Hartford had its church quarrel, which, under the care and meddlesomeness of the General Court, grew worse and worse till the church was rent in twain. Before the suppression of the New Haven jurisdiction in 1664, there was already in Connecticut a strong and growing party determined to subvert the purely *Conn. Col. Records, i, 106, III.

Congregational constitution of the churches, and to establish in place of it that Old-World system which Davenport called "the parish way,"-a system which substitutes the territorial parish for the covenanted church, and invests the parish minister with a sort of lordship over the brotherhood. Whether the contending parties knew it or not, the bottom question in those church controversies which agitated the Connecticut colony and gave the General Court so much trouble, seems to have been, in reality, the question between the old-England parish way and the Congregational way of the Pilgrims. It had not yet been found out in that colony-and indeed some good men even now seem not to know-that if a Congregational church does not govern itself it can not be governed at all; and therefore the General Court, instead of being discouraged by the ill success of one experiment after another, went on usurping more and more of jurisdiction over ecclesiastical concerns. It was that growing Erastianism in Connecticut-that intermeddling of the state with the churchthat increasing proclivity toward "the parish way," which broke down the courage of Davenport, when, in his declining age, he saw his own colony absorbed by Connecticut, and these churches on the sound, which till then had been undisturbed in their self-government, brought under the tutelage of that civil authority which had managed so badly in attempting to govern the churches on the river. This is what he was thinking of when he said in his despondency, "Christ's interest in New Haven colony is miserably lost."

I find myself repeating some things which I said years ago at the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our General Association, and which were printed in the volume of "Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Connecticut." Therefore I will proceed no farther, in this direction, than simply to say that, for a long time after the absorption of the New Haven colony, the relation of the Congregational churches of Connecticut to civil government was subordination and subjection. Puritanism, as in the Westminster Assembly, exalted itself against Congregationalism. For more than a century, the attempt was persistently made to get rid of the

simple and primitive polity which the Pilgrims brought with them from Leyden, which Davenport and Hooker alike had defended, and which had been formulated, somewhat crudely, in the Cambridge Platform. Even the word "Congregational" was dropped and disowned as no longer descriptive of the Connecticut church polity. Yet that subjection of the churches to "the civil authority here established," was by no means a quiet subjection; for (and let us be thankful that it is so), so long as a church retains any of the forms of Congregationalism with anything of the spirit which deduced those forms from the Scriptures,-so long as it derives its right of self-government directly from Christ-so long it will be unquiet under any attempt to govern it by outside authority whether civil or ecclesiastical. Accordingly the civil gov ernment of Connecticut found by long and laborious experience, that its assumed episcopate over the churches of Connecticut was by no means a sinecure. It would be a ludicrous story, and yet a sad one, if I should tell what trouble the Honorable Assembly had in its "care of all the churches." There were conflicts about the right of admission to sacramental privileges-conflicts about the authority of pastors to rule and overrule the brotherhood-conflicts prior to the Saybrook Platform, and worse conflicts under the Saybrook Platform-conflicts between large minorities and small majorities about the settlement of ministers; and every such conflict was deemed a fit occasion for the interference of the

civil government. The meddlesome interference in such cases continued, and proceeded from bad to worse, till at last it became intolerable, and the genius of Congregationalism, reviving in the great religious revival, began to reassert itself. Meanwhile successive steps of legislation had been unwittingly preparing the way for the emancipation of the churches.

At first there were no known dissenters from the established, or (as we say) Congregational, churches. Forty years after the beginning of the colony, the only pronounced dissenters were "four or five Seventh-day men, and about so many more Quakers." But in 1707 there began to be in

Stratford a society professing conformity to the Church of England; and, the next year, it was provided by law, in imitation of the English statute (1689) that "such persons as soberly dissent from the way of worship and ministry established by the laws" might maintain public worship in their own way. This was the first concession, by law, to liberty of worship in Puritan Connecticut-a concession to adherents of the English establishment, whose society at Stratford was the first attempt to organize dissent within the limits of the colony. From this beginning there was progress in the concession of liberty to one denomination after another of dissenters from the established order to Church-of-England men, to Baptists, and to Quakers; though Congregationalism, meanwhile, was rigorously held in with bit and bridle by the civil government. The story of the measures taken by the legislature and magistracy of Connecticut, to regulate the "disorders" connected with, or consequent upon, the Great Awakening, is simply disgraceful. Nor was the effect on religious interests any better than the effort of similar attempts elsewhere and in other ages. The enthusiasm of the "Separates "-as they were called, who withdrew from the worship and ministry established by law, and fell back on the "strict Congregationalism" of the original Separatists from the Church of England-became more extravagant, and their disorders more conscientious, under the policy which attempted to suppress them by civil power. At last, by the irresistible tendency of a vital force in the State and in the churches, at last, I say, but not completely till within the present century-the Congregational churches were freed from the civil episcopate that had so long embarrassed them. Now, at last, we may say without contradiction from any quarter, that the polity of our Connecticut churches is identical with the polity of the New England churches; and that their Congregational self-government is essentially the same with that which was expounded by Hooker and Davenport— essentially the same with that for which the martyrs under Queen Elizabeth were hanged.

Yet, through all the period from the union of the colonies.