USA > Vermont > Bennington County > Bennington > Memorials of a century. Embracing a record of individuals and events, chiefly in the early history of Bennington, Vt., and its First church > Part 26
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1 See the succeeding pages,
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. felt their force, when they, in their first church meeting, and as a fundamental act, voted to except to these articles, receiving the entire platform beside.
The law enacted in Massachusetts in 1760, requiring a university education, or the testimony of a major part of the settled ministry of the country that the minister is of suf- ficient learning, or making the assessment for his support void, was, it is quite likely, aimed at the Separates. With this - perhaps with some other - slight exception, the pre- vailing form in which, in Massachusetts, the Separates felt the civil magistrate's coercive power, was that of being obliged, under existing general statutes, to pay taxes to the regular ministry ; and of being incompetent to collect by law any assessment or subscription for their own minister. As Separate congregations, distinctively so known, there was no relief for them from this, in law, until the adoption of the constitution of 1780 ; and even then the instrument was so interpreted for years as to make it of comparatively little advantage to the Separates. For example, it was claimed by the dominant party that the privilege of minor- ity worship, without liability to pay taxes for the support of the standing order, was, by this constitution, confined to incorporated societies, and in case of such incorporated society, if not the regular or established society of the town, they must pay their tax with the others to the collector, and, let it go for the parish minister, or recover back their por- tion for the payment of their own minister by suing it out, - so decided in 1808, by a decision of the Supreme Court.1
It is true there were exempting laws, so called (laws to exempt certain classes from the tax to support the es- tablished worship of the town), but no such law was ever passed for the benefit of the Separates. There was an ex- empting law as early as 1693, for Boston, by which all
1 Montague vs. Dedham, 4 Mass., 269.
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EXEMPTING LAWS.
denominations and religious societies were as free, with respect to public worship, as at this day ; and so it has ever since been in that city. Exempting laws for five years, seven years, eleven years, at a time, first began to be en- acted for Episcopalians in 1727 ; for Baptists and Quakers in 1728. The differing sects were then very inconsider- able.1 But for the New-Light Congregational churches, in towns where the old church remained and was in the ma- jority, not only were no exempting laws in favor enacted, but especial care was taken, in the re-enacting of such ex- empting laws as had been previously obtained, to so guard them with new restrictions that the minority Congrega- tional churches could by no means take advantage of them. There was a portion of the New-Light churches which em- braced Baptist views. It was inferred that many did this to take advantage of the exempting laws for Baptists. Probably this was true of some. It could not have been true of all, for, in many instances, these persons refused to comply with the exempting laws as Baptists, assuming that they were wrong in principle, so that they could more con- scientiously go to prison than give any countenance to such laws by voluntary conformity to any of their require- ments, - the laws requiring certificates that they were of the Baptist persuasion, or that their names should be en- tered on a list to the same effect, by the proper authority. With regard to the period we are now considering, we see
1 First Baptist church in Massachusetts, in Swansea, 1663. One in Boston as early as 1665. - Benedict. In 1737, but three Baptist churches in Massachusetts ; one in Swansea, one in Boston, one in South Brimfield. - Benedict. Backus says there was a church in Sutton in 1735, though it afterward went down; was, at the time of the New-Light stir, turned into a Separate church. When religion revived in 1741, there were but nine Baptist churches in all Massachusetts, and none in New Hampshire and Vermont. - Backus. There was an Episcopal church in Boston during the Andrus administration, 1686-9. - Barry. "The Methodists made their appearance in the Commonwealth about 1720." - Mass. Ecc. Law, p. 41.
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an illustration of what has been here said in the titles of some of the enactments : -
.
"To the intent that the Anabaptists who are truly such may be distinguished from those who pretend to be."
To see the same thing in the enactment itself, take one for 1752 : -
" To exclude all Baptist churches from power to give legal cer- tificates, until they obtain certificates from three other Baptist churches that they esteem such to be conscientiously Anabap- tist."
The Separate churches, which had adopted immersion as the scriptural mode of baptism, had not generally denied the validity, in every case, of infant baptism and baptism by sprinkling, which is, perhaps, the meaning of Anabap- tist. The regular Baptist churches might be as jealous of these Separate Baptist churches as the regular Congrega- tional churches were. So it is plain what was the intention and force of such modifications as have been instanced of the original exempting laws.
It is probable that, in very many instances, the laws were not enforced upon Separates who refused to pay taxes to the Standing Order. As, in many churches (Hardwick and Westfield, e. g.), church discipline to the extreme of excommunication was not enforced upon separating mem- bers who seemed to be conscientious in their views. But there were instances sufficient to make manifest the animus of the taxing laws themselves, at least as re-enacted from time to time. When enforced, the method was one, hap- pily, unfamiliar to the present generation in this country, but then familiar in many relations of the application of the civil power other than that of the support of public wor- ship. It does not appear that the Separates, as a class,
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367
TAXING LAWS NOT ALWAYS ENFORCED.
objected, at that early day, to the laws of imprisonment for just debts, but they did object to laws of imprisonment for refusing to pay taxes to a church they did not in con- science approve, - laws which enforced the distraining, in some cases, of the necessary implements of household ex- istence, for such taxes, from those who had nothing else the law could get hold of. In the records of the Newint Separate church is the following entry : "Joseph Read confessed the wrong he had done in paying his rates, and the church forgave him."
Backus, who was originally a regular Congregationalist, then a Separate, then a Baptist, in his three-volume ecclesias- tical history, has preserved many cases of much hardship in Massachusetts, under the laws requiring the support of the regular Congregational Society. Among these sufferers were a few instances of Separates, and many instances of those who from Separates became Baptists. Some of these suffered according to law, and some without law. There were others whom the laws exempted, but they could not, as they alleged, in conscience comply with the conditions of the exempting laws. The historian of Chelmsford states that all separation and all following after itinerants and exhorters were effectually repressed there by church disci- pline. In many places the Separates, not having organ- ized their church regularly, according to law, were harassed by taxation for the support of the ministers from whom they had seceded. At last the system of annoyance be- came too tedious to be continued and fell into disuse.1
II. LAWS OF VERMONT RESPECTING PUBLIC WORSHIP. - In respect of imprisonment or any other corporeal pun- ishment as a means of compelling men to the performance
1 Tracy's " Great Awakening," p. 417. See in the notes at the end of this vol- ume.
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MEMORIALS OF A CENTURY.
of religious duty, Vermont has a clean record. Before the existence of the State, Christian people in Bennington, as we have seen, organizing the first church in what afterward became the State of Vermont, made express exception to the articles in the Cambridge Platform which affirm the duty of the civil power to see that religious matters take proper direction. This was while Massachusetts was re- enacting her exempting laws with new restrictions to force the Separates to pay taxes to the Standing Order, and whilst Connecticut was not quite through with imprisoning men for preaching within the bounds of other men's par- ishes, or for establishing new places of public worship with- out the consent of the old ones.
The tax of six dollars on each of the sixty-three rights of land, to build, not only the school-house, but, also, the meeting-house, might have been without any opposition from any of the proprietors. Indeed, whether this tax was ever collected does not appear, - neither does anything appear to the contrary, only a subscription list for building the meeting-house was also obtained. For the further finishing of the meeting-house, in 1774, or at least toward it, a subscription was also obtained. The moneys from time to time raised upon the tax lists were raised from those lists only which were voluntarily brought in for that purpose. The certificating laws in force for seventeen years, 1783-1801, came the nearest to compulsory support of public religion. These required every tax-payer to help in the support of the public worship favored by the majority of the inhabitants, who could not bring a certificate, signed by the minister, or deacon, or elders, or moderator of some meeting of another persuasion, that the tax-payer named was of that persuasion. In 1801, any person could be ex- empted from taxation for religious purposes by signing a paper on the records of the town, saying, "I dissent from
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FIRST CONSTITUTION.
the worship of the majority." In 1807, even this require- ment was abolished,1 and ever since the people have been free to support the public worship they prefer, or none, if they so prefer.
The article on religious worship in the first constitution is as follows : -
"That all men have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings, regulated by the word of God; and that no man ought, or of right can be compelled, to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship, or maintain any minister contrary to the dictate of his conscience; nor can any man who professes the Protestant religion be justly deprived or abridged of any civil right as a citizen on account of his religious sentiment, or peculiar mode of religious worship; and that no au- thority can or ought to be vested in, or assumed by, any power whatsoever that shall in any case interfere with, or in any manner control, the rights of conscience in the free exercise of religious worship ; nevertheless every sect or denomination of people ought to observe the Sabbath or Lord's day, and keep up and support some sort of religious worship, which to them shall seem most agreeable to the will of God." 2
In the first constitution, and also in that revised by the Council of Censors in 1785, the following declaration is re- quired of the members of the House of Representatives : -
" I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the uni- verse, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration; and own and profess the Protest- ant religion."
In the revised constitution, adopted in convention at Windsor, in 1793, this clause was omitted.
1 See Tolman's Revised Statutes, 1808.
2 Article 3, in Declaration of Rights in the first constitution, adopted in general convention at Windsor, 1777, never presented to the people to be ratified, but de- clared to have the force of law by the General Assembly at Bennington, 1779.
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The public sentiment and understanding with regard to the liberty in this State respecting religion- though not exactly in accordance with the legislation of the State prior to 1801- was thus stated by Dr. Williams, in his history, published in 1794 :-
" To leave every man a full and perfect liberty to follow the dic- tates of his own conscience in all his transactions with his Maker." " The people of Vermont have adopted this principle in its fullest extent." "It is not barely toleration, but equality, which the peo- ple aim at." "That all denominations shall enjoy equal liberty, without any legal distinction or pre-eminence whatever." "The people are under no obligation to support any teachers but what they choose to lay themselves under."
It is absurd to ascribe the sole agency in a great step of progress in civilization to any set of men. Time prepares beforehand for its own changes. The reformers, so called, are but in advance of others in taking up, and giving ex- pression to, the new convictions which generations have been slowly preparing for. It is the glory of reformers to be before others in discerning the advancing light, or in so feeling the force of the truth as to be constrained to utter it, to maintain it, when they have to do so alone, and even in the face of obloquy and persecution, because others do not see, or will not accept, the truth. So high a distinc- tion with regard to civil and religious liberty in this coun- try deserves to be shared, among others, by the Separates, of whom our Bennington pioneers were among the best examples.
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371
CHURCH MEMBERS AND THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE.
NOTES ON CHAPTERS IV. AND XXVIII.
I. THE HALFWAY COVENANT. - By the halfway covenant per- sons could be, and were, admitted to the church without professing a change of heart, indeed, while professing not to have experienced this change, - such persons to come to the communion or not, as their duty should appear to themselves.1 But all were required to assent to a covenant otherwise strict, and to bring their children to be baptized. The halfway-covenant members were capable of the elective franchise, and eligible to office where church member- ship was a requisite.2
"The effect of this method of proceeding in the churches in New England which have fallen into it is actually this. There are some who are received into these churches under the notion of their being in the judgment of rational charity visible saints, who yet at the same time are actually . . , such as freely and fre- quently acknowledge that they do not profess to be as yet born again, but look on themselves as really unconverted ; and, accordingly, it is known all over the town where they live, that they make no pretension to any sanctifying grace already attained ;
1 " Also that it is your full purpose to obey God in the ordinance of the Holy Supper as God shall give you light and show you his will herein."-Cont. Ecc. Hist. Conn., p. 411.
2 This law, making "free burgesses " of church members only, ceased in the New Haven colony by the merging of the colony with Hartford, Windsor, and Weathersfield in that of Connecticut, under the charter of Charles II., in 1662.
By the charter of Massachusetts colony (March 4, 1629) the governor and as- sistants were empowered to say who should be freemen ; in 1631, this privilege of freemen was limited to churchi members. The rule appears to have been strictly enforced until 1647, when some others beside church members might have the privilege of voting in some cases in the towns. In 1660, we find the original rigor again enacted in all its completeness by law ; in 1664, the law was repealed and certain others beside church members admitted to the privileges of freemen, but so that very serious inequality existed still between church members and non- church members. In 1684, the colony charter was annulled, and probably the in- equality of the law of 1664 between church members and non-church members then ceased. All such inequality was removed by the coming into force of the Province charter in 1692, which made all freeholders, etc., voters; by which, as Bancroft says, " in civil affairs, the freedom of the colony, no longer restricted to the members of the church, was extended so widely as to be in a practical sense nearly universal."
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nor, of consequence, are they commonly looked upon as any other than unconverted persons." 1
" In such churches (halfway covenant) neither their publicly saying that they avouch God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to be their God, and that they give themselves up to him, and promise to obey all his commands, nor their coming to the Lord's Supper, or to any other ordinances, are taken for expressions or signs of any- thing belonging to the essence of Christian piety. But, on the contrary, the public doctrine, principle, and custom in such churches, establishes a diverse use of these words and signs. People are taught that they may use them all, and not so much as make any pretence to the least degree of sanctifying grace, and this is the established custom. So they are used, and so they are un- derstood." 2
" But the fifth of those propositions (seven propositions affirmed by the majority of the Synod of 1662) reaffirmed and commended to the churches the crude expedient of the halfway covenant. It did not merely provide that baptized persons growing up in the church with blameless character, and without any overt denial of the faith in which they were nurtured, might offer their children for baptism without being required to demand and obtain at the same time the privilege of full communion; but it also provided that such persons, as a condition preliminary to the baptism of their children, should make a certain public profession of Christian faith and Christian obedience, including a formal covenant with God and with the church, which, at the same time, was to be un- derstood as implying no profession of any Christian experience. The latter was a grave theological error hardening and establishing itself in the form of an ecclesiastical system." 3
"It was what Davenport called the 'parish way,' -a system under which the local church, as a covenanting brotherhood of souls, renewed by the experience of God's grace, was to be merged in the parish ; and all persons of good moral character living with- in 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." 4
1 Edwards' Qualifications for Communion, Part III., Obj. 15.
2 Edwards' Qualifications for Communion, Part II., Sec. 1.
3 Dr. Bacon, in Cont. Ecc. Hist. Conn., pp. 21, 22.
4 Ibid., pp. 28, 29.
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SPREAD OF THE HALFWAY COVENANT.
The effect of the prevalency of this system is stated by a writer in the " Vermont Evangelical Magazine," August, 1815, as fol- lows : "The engagements which were assumed were extensive and solemn, and were at first probably made with much serious- ness. But the whole soon became an idle ceremony, which fashion so imperiously required all, generally upon their marriage, to ob- serve, that the omission was deemed highly indecorous and almost inconsistent with a reputable standing in society. The prescribed formality having been heedlessly submitted to, nothing more was anticipated or exacted. Individuals having gained a sort of rela- tion to the church, and the privilege of baptismn for their children, became satisfied with themselves, and neither saw nor felt the ne- cessity of anything beyond the customary and heartless attendance upon public worship on the Sabbath."
A citation or two will show the influence of this system upon the piety of the clergy. Dr. Chauncey, in his " Reasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England," declared, " Conversion does not appear to be alike necessary for ministers in their public capacity as officers of the church,1 as it is in their private capacity." Tracy, in his "Great Awakening," says, " Col- leges received young men, without even the appearance of piety, to prepare for the ministry ; if graduates were found to possess com- petent knowledge, and were neither heretical nor scandalous, their piety was taken for granted, and they were ordained of course." 2 " The extensively prevailing views of regeneration as a work at- tended by no ascertainable evidence discouraged all questioning concerning a minister's spiritual state." 3
A movement to obtain approbation of this system with some other things in a New England Synod took place as far back as 1657.4 A Massachusetts Synod, in 1662, went a little further, in giving the system an authoritative introduction into this country. " The church at New Haven, I suspect, yielded at, or soon after, the ordination of Mr. Pierpont in 1684. Near the close of the cen- tury, when Haynes and Whiting had been succeeded by Wood- bridge in the First Church (Hartford), and Buckingham in the Second, we find both pastors and both churches united in the half-
1 "Ordinations in 1759 occasioned so much 'feasting, jollity, and revelling,' that the Council addressed the clergy a circular on the subject."- Mass. Ecc. Law, p. 23.
2,3 Ibid., pp. 393, 394.
4 Cont. Ecc. Hist., Conn., p. 19.
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way covenant method of church discipline. The principles of the Synod, of 1662 were for the time victorious throughout New England."1 In 1704 the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Mass. (the grandfather of Pres. Edwards the elder, and with whom at length Mr. Edwards became colleague pastor in the same church), when he had been in the ministry at Northampton thirty- two years, eminently respected, declared himself "of the opinion that unconverted persons, considered as such, had a right in the sight of God, or by his appointment, to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; that thereby it was their duty to come to that ordinance, though they knew they had no true goodness or evangelical holi- ness. He maintained that visible Christianity does not consist in a profession or appearance of that wherein true holiness or real Christianity consists; that therefore the profession which persons make in order to be received as visible members of Christ's church, ought not to be such as to express or imply a real compliance with, or consenting to, the terms of this covenant of grace, or a hearty embracing of the gospel; so that they who really reject Jesus Christ and dislike the gospel way of salvation in their hearts and know that this is true of themselves, may make the profession without lying and hypocrisy,"2 on the principle that they regard the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as a converting ordinance, and partake of it with the hope of conversion. "We must remember that the practice of admitting to the communion all persons, neither heretical nor scandalous, was general in the Presbyterian church, and prevailed extensively among the Congregational churches."3 If we place the time of the first foothold of this system as early as 1657, we shall find it not wholly disappearing from the Orthodox Congregational churches of New England for more than a century and a half. From the church in Huntington, Conn. (from whose halfway covenant a quotation is introduced into these pages), it did not disappear until 1817. The Rev. He- man Humphrey was ordained in Fairfield, Conn., March 16, 1807. " He found a state of things in Fairfield in regard to spiritual religion that seemed to him to call loudly for reform. In addition to the fact that such a thing as family prayer was scarcely known in the church, there was nothing that he considered as amounting
1 Dr. Bacon, Cont. Ecc. Hist., Conn., p. 29.
2 Quoted from Dr. Hopkins in the Memoirs of President Edwards.
3 Great Awakening, p. 391.
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DR. CHAUNCEY'S BOOK.
to a confession of faith ; and there was the halfway covenant, which he regarded as nothing better than an organized provision for uniting the church and the world. The two latter difficulties he looked upon as entering vitally into the economy of the church; and he therefore made the removal of them a condition of his accepting the call; and the church, without much hesitation, acceded to his proposals."1 The spread and influence of the half- way covenant probably culminated about 1740, or the time of the commencement of "The Great Awakening;" at that time it had borne fruit " after its kind " in a wide-spread and deep-rooted for- malism in the churches; and, as we shall see in another place, in a fearful enlistment of the civil power in resistance to the " New- Light " men and measures that sought its overthrow.
A curious fact, illustrating the extent to which this false system became entrenched in society, is the book of the Rev. Dr. Chauncey, well known to have been prepared in opposition to the great religious revival then in progress. The friends of the prevailing spirit of religious society, and who were opposed to the "New- Light " movement, were quicksighted to see whither this awaken- ing would tend; and the book referred to appeared upon the arena in their behalf. " A Treatise in five parts : 1. Faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious appearances in the land, etc., etc .; by Charles Chauncey, D.D., pastor of the First Church of Christ in Boston 1743," - a book of four hundred and twenty-four pages with a pref- ace of thirty pages beside. With the book was bound up, as was usual in those days, a list of subscribers. This list contains over one thousand names, headed conspicuously with His Excellency William Shirley, Esq., captain-general and governor-in-chief over His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, for six; the Hon. Jonathan Law, Esq., governor of the colony of Connecticut; the Hon. Richard Ward, Esq., governor of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations; and so on- ward into the body of the list, - a proportion of honorables and reverends, and esquires, truly formidable, - in accordance with what is known to be the fact that, to a great extent at that time, the influence and learning and rank in the country was on the side of the halfway covenant and hostile to the reformation.
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