M ORE than two entire generations lived and died after the adoption of the Cambridge Platform, before any important movement was made for its modification. Now and then, indeed, one may get glimpses of a considerable popular drift, which the careful investigator will note as indicating the feeling with which the churches were regarding that document, and the system which it enshrines. That matters were not working as well as had been desired, and anticipated, became obvious within twenty years. As not all of the children of the first settlers, nor of those immigrants who with them constituted the second generation of colonists, saw their way clear to confess Christ and thus gain admission to full church privileges, it followed that many of the children. who were to compose the third generation, were growing up, as Cotton Mather phrased it, "excluded from the Baptism of Christianity, and from the Ecclesiastical Inspection which is to accompany that Baptism." This was the greater grief to "the Grand-fathers" that, as he continues, "it was to leave their Offspring under the Shepherdly Government of our Lord Jesus Christ in his Ordinances, that they had brought their Lambs into this Wilderness;" and with them it was a chief concern that the religious prosperity which had blessed their beginnings, "might not be a Res unius ætatis, a matter of one Age alone." They labored with their sons and daughters, "sober Persons, who professed themselves desirous to renew their Baptismal-Covenant, and submit unto the Church-Discipline, and so have their Houses also marked for the Lord's;" but did not find them ready to "come up to that experimental Account of their own Regeneration, which would sufficiently embolden their Access to the other Sacrament." I It has been usual to represent the matter as further complicated by civil considerations, arising out of the law of the Massachusetts and New Haven colonies limiting the franchise to church members; making it important, as well to save the State from being enfeebled, as the church from being impoverished, that some wider door be opened into the latter. That this is an error becomes obvious, however, on careful review of the facts. Such a reason does not seem to have been mentioned at the time. I am aware of no proof that half-way cove nant members of the church, by that relation did acquire any further privilege in the State. Moreover, before the action of the Synod proposing the half-way covenant had been concluded, the king's letter of 28 June-8 July, 1662, had arrived, requiring that "all the freeholders of competent estates, not vitious in conversacōn & orthodoxe in religion (though of dif ferent persuasions concerning church gouernment) may haue their votes in the election of all officers, both ciuill & military,"3 etc.; and in Massachusetts the old law was soon formally repealed, and the order passed that "henceforth all Englishmen presenting a cirtifficat, vnder the hands of the ministers or minister of the place where they dwell, that they are orthodox in religion & not vitious in theire liues,” etc., be allowed the freeman's privileges; so that any change in the 1 Magnalia, v: 63. 2 Even so well-informed a student of New England history as the late Dr. J. S. Clark, fell into this error in his valuable - one might, in consideration of its nearly sole relation to all just hinting of the religious history of Massachusetts from its settlement down to the present generation, call it invaluable-Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts, from 1620 to 1858, etc., 83. 3 The Letter is in Mass. Col. Rec., iv(2): 164. 4 Ibid, 118. constitution of the churches in this motive would hardly be natural at such a time. Which reasons are further enforced by the consideration that the controversy out of which the Council and the Synod, and the half-way covenant grew, originated in the Connecticut colony, where no such restriction of civil freedom had ever existed. The motive, then, appears to have been with most a pure and religious one. But it grew, no doubt, out of the "fermentation of that leaven of Presbyterianism which came over not with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower, but with the later Puritan emigration," and it touchingly reveals to us how tenderly the best piety of that day regarded God's covenant with His people, and how highly it estimated the practical value of "regular church watch" and discipline, as means of grace." Unfortunate Connecticut, as I have said, was first to move. differences of opinion had for some time disturbed the church in Hartford, leading to the calling of several councils, whose results had failed to allay the excitement. There had grown up in that colony, morcover, a strong party which advocated a return to the ancient plan of admitting all persons of regular life to full communion in the churches. Obliged to contribute to the support of a minister in whose election they had no voice, and denied "the honours and privileges of church-members for themselves, and baptism for their children," because they "knew not how to comply with the rigid terms of the Congregational churches," they were uneasy and desired a change. In the hope of gaining wisdom and moral support upon a topic of common concernment, the magistrates of that colony suggested to the General Court of Massachusetts the calling of a council of some selected Elders to consider and advise in the premises. The Massachusetts Court thereon passed an order' that thirteen of the Teaching Elders within its jurisdiction 5 Dr. Bacon presses this point: "On such a theory how is it to be explained that the troubles which the theory accounts for, began in just that colony in which no such exclusion had ever been established or attempted?" Contrib. to Eccl. Hist. Conn., 17. 6 Ibid. 7 Dr. Fiske has stated the case with great learning and fairness in his centennial ad Contrib. to dress before the Essex North. meet in the following summer for the purpose named, desiring the coöperation of the confederate colonies therein. Plymouth did not respond. New Haven declined to send.10 Connecticut delegated four of its Pastors, or Teachers." The meeting began in Boston on Thursday, 4-14 June, 1657, and after a fortnight's consideration, concluded it to be the duty of adults who had been baptized when children "tho' not yet fit for the Lord's Supper, to own the Covenant they made with their Parents by entering thereinto in their own persons;" and the correlate duty of the church to call upon them for the performance of this, and to censure them for its neglect; and further declared its judgment that in case such parents "understand the Grounds of Religion, and are not Scandalous, and solemnly own the Covenant in their own Persons," there can be no sufficient cause to deny baptism to their children." 99 13 14 This failed, however, to compose the strife. It indeed made matters worse. It alarmed many, as insidiously proposing a harmful innovation. And the opposition grew so formidable as "could not be encountred with any thing less than a Synod of Elders and Messengers, from all the Churches in the Massachuset Colony." Such a Synod "of above seventy," met in Boston on Tuesday, 11-21 March, 1662, and after two adjournments, reached its result in the September following. The difficulty which pressed them lay in the fact that "through their own Doubts and Fears, and partly thro' other culpable Neglects," many of the children of the first colonists "had not actually come up to the covenanting State of Communicants at the Table of the Lord." This excluded their children not only 10 New Haven Col. Rec., ii: 196. 11 Col. Rec. Conn., i: 288. Delegates: Messrs. Warham, Stone, Blinman and Russell. 12 For the Hartford troubles, see especially Collections Conn. Hist. Soc., ii: 51-125. See also Congregational Quarterly, iv: 272; C. Mather, Magnalia, v: 63. See also A Disputation concerning Church Members and their Children, etc., London, 1659, passim. See Thornton's Lives of Heath, Bowles, etc. (1850) [71, 72], for an extract from Dorches ter church records, showing that that church in 1654-5 had brought this subject to the notice of the churches of Boston, Roxbury, Ded ham and Braintree; and had voted that children of church-members having children "should have ym baptized if ymselves did take hold of their ffathers covenant." The church in Ipswich [Cont. to Eccl. Hist. Essex Co., Mass., 271] soon passed a similar vote, and the church in Salem had done much the same two or three years before. See D. A. White, N. E. Congregationalism, etc. (1861), 60. 13 Magnalia, v: 63. See record of action calling Synod, Mass. Col. Rec., iv(2): 38. 14 J. Mitchell, Answer to Apologetical Preface (by I. Mather) to J. Davenport's Another Lssay, etc., p. iii. from baptism, but from "the Ecclesiastical Inspection " which went with it. The question was whether any way could be legitimately devised by which such persons, who had not boldness of access to the Lord's table, could yet be admitted to some relation to the church which should difference their condition from that of pagans who might happen to hear the Word of God in their assemblies. Two expedients were possible. The terms of church-membership might be so far lowered, that any baptized person not scandalous in life might be admitted to full communion, and the right to have his children baptized, without evidence of regeneration. Or a qualified and subordi nate membership, allowing baptized persons of moral life and orthodox belief to belong to the church so far as to receive baptism for their children, and all privileges but that of the Lord's Supper for themselves, might be established. The former would have been too flagrant a backsliding from the very essentials of Puritanism, and so the latter, though involving "a grave theological error hardening and establishing itself in the form of an ecclesiastical system," received the suffrage of the Synod, by a vote of more than sixty to less than ten; the want cf unanimity being emphasized by the quality of the opposition, more than by its quantity." 16 This "Half-way Covenant," as it has been usually and aptly called, while it made a show of meeting the difficulty, and of keeping the church pure by this fond distinction between "half-way" and full membership, was earnestly opposed by Chauncy, Davenport" and others, because they had the 13 15 Dr. L. Bacon, Discourse at Norwich, Contrib. to Eccles. Hist. Conn., 22. 16" More than seven to one." Magnalia, v: 77. "We suppose there were not Five twice told that did in any thing Vote on the Negative in the late Synod," . . . "in the Third Proposition... there appeared not above Three that dissented." Mitchell, as above. 17 Mather says [Magnalia, v: 77] it came from "several Reverend and Judicious Persons in that Venerable Assembly;" and Pres. Chauncy [Anti-Synodalia, etc., 15] speaks of the minority as "many of Gods faithfull and conscientious people and ministers." 18"It is apparent unto all what a corrupt masse of unbelievers shall by this change throng into the fellowship of God's People, 20 and the children of strangers uncircumcised odalia, etc., 10.] 20" If we may do so [as the Synod advised], |