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CHAPTER in the ascendant. By the Corporation Act lately passed, all municipal magistrates were required to renounce the 1662. Solemn League and Covenant, and to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity had restored the Liturgy, the canons, and the ceremonials, replacing the Church of England exactly as it stood before the meeting of the late Long Parliament. All clergymen who refused to conform were to lose their cures. To this pressure by far the greater part both of the clergy and laity quietly submitted. But a considerable portion of these forced conformists still retained many of their old sentiments, thus constituting the basis of that Low Church party, or party verging toward Presbyterianism, one of the two great sections into which the Church of England has ever since been divided. Near two thousand clergymen, however, headed by Owen and Baxter, rather than renounce Presbyterianism, suffered themselves to be driven from their cures. They found many adherents among the laity, especially the traders and craftsmen of the towns and cities, and became the fathers of that nonconformist body which has constituted ever since an important element in the political and social system of England. Swept thus suddenly from the headship of an established church, these Presbyterian ministers had now the mortification to find themselves confounded with the Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and other sectaries whom they hated. Exposed to all the old persecuting statutes, now revived in full force, they were forbidden to preach without a bishop's license and the use of the Liturgy, under a penalty of three months' imprisonment.

With the late leaders of the Independents it had gone still harder. Several of them had been already executed for their concern in the late king's death Sir Henry

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Vane, formerly governor of Massachusetts, and always CHAPTER a firm friend of New England, presently suffered a similar fate. Others were concealed or in exile. The In- 1662. dependents were far before their time. Their short reign was over. The press, which Cromwell had left free, was now again subjected to a strict censorship. These changes in the mother country occasioned some emigration to New England, but not to any great extent.

The Massachusetts agents presently returned, bearers Sept of a royal letter, in which the king recognized the charter, and promised oblivion of all past offenses. But he demanded the repeal of all laws inconsistent with his due authority; an oath of allegiance to the royal person, as formerly in use, but dropped since the commencement of the late civil war; the administration of justice in his name; complete toleration for the Church of England; the repeal of the law which restricted the privilege of voting and tenure of office to church members, and the substitution of a property qualification instead ; finally, the admission of all persons of honest lives to the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Little favor was shown for the Quakers; indeed, liberty was expressly given to make a "sharp law" against thema permission eagerly availed of to revive the act by which vagabond Quakers were ordered to be whipped from town to town out of the jurisdiction; those resident in the colony being subject to fines and other heavy penalties, and liable, if they returned after being once expelled, to be treated as vagabonds.

The claimants for toleration, formerly suppressed with such prompt severity, were now encouraged, by the king's demands in their favor, again to raise their heads. For the next thirty years the people of Massa

CHAPTER chusetts were divided into three parties. A very deXIV. cided, though gradually diminishing majority, sustain

In

1662. ed with ardor the theocratic system, and, as essential to it, entire independence of external control. At the opposite extreme, a party, small in numbers and feeble in influence, advocated religious toleration, at least to a limited extent, and equal civil rights for all inhabitants. They advocated, also, the supremacy of the crown, sole means in that day of curbing the theocracy, and compelling it to yield its monopoly of power. To this party belonged the Episcopalians, or those inclined to become such, the Baptists, Quakers, and other sectaries, who feared less the authority of a distant monarch than the present rule of watchful and bitter spiritual rivals. termediate was a third party, weak at first, but daily growing stronger, and drawing to its ranks, one after another, some former zealous advocates of the exclusive system, convinced that theocracy, in its stricter form, was no longer tenable, and some of them, perhaps, beginning to be satisfied that it was not desirable. Among the earliest of these converts were Norton and Bradstreet, the agents, who came back from England impressed with the necessity of yielding. But the avowal of such sentiments was fatal to their popularity; and Norton, accustomed to nothing but reverence and applause, finding himself now looked at with distrust, soon died of melancholy and mortification.

The vigor of the theocratic system, by the operation of internal causes, was already somewhat relaxed. In spite of the doctrines of total depravity, special grace, and personal regeneration, the influence of parental tenderness had induced the founders of the New England churches to extend from themselves to their "infant seed" the privileges of baptism and a partial church

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membership. Among these baptized children, now grown CHAPTER up, were many men of property, reputable lives, and social influence, who conformed strictly to all the observ- 1662 ances of the established religion, which they had been educated to regard with profound veneration, but who did not feel, and who were too sincere and too honest to counterfeit those spiritual ecstasies, that change of heart, and inward assurance, in which, by the creed of the New England churches, saving faith was supposed to consist. Lacking this essential qualification, they hesi tated to complete what their fathers had begun, by asking admittance as full church members to the Lord's Supper; but they insisted, at the same time, on securing for their children, also, the spiritual benefits of baptism, and the civil privileges of church membership. This demand, for some years past, had been an anxious subject 1657 of consideration, especially in Connecticut, where the churches were much torn in pieces by it, so that a Massachusetts council had to be called in to promote a 1659. reconciliation. About the time of the return of the agents, a synod met to take this subject into consideration. The majority of the ministers, alarmed at the aspect of things in England, and always better informed and more liberal than the majority of the church members, were willing to enlarge somewhat the basis of their polity. Under the influence of Mitchell-who, having arrived a boy, had been educated in the colony-successor of Shepard as minister of Cambridge, the synod came to a result the same with that agreed upon by a select council of Massachusetts ministers five years before, authorizing what was called the "half-way covenant:" the admission to baptism, that is, of the children of po.. ons of acceptable characte:, who approved the confessi of faith, and had themselves been baptized in infancy

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CHAPTER though not church members in full communion. This result was approved by the Massachusetts General 1662. Court. But a large party, narrow, and stiff, and resolute in the monopoly of spiritual and civil privileges, still stickled with great pertinacity for the old-fashioned exclusiveness, so that several of the ministers did not dare carry out in their own parishes that result of the synod which they had been active in procuring.

Davenport and Chauncey protested against the halfway covenant. Increase Mather, the young and able minister of the second Church of Boston, opposed at first the result of the synod; but he afterward changed his mind and gave it his support. This question, which continued for several years a subject of dispute and inquietude, gave occasion to several pamphlets. The press at Cambridge was kept, however, under a strict censorship, Mitchell being one of the censors; nor was any other press allowed to be established.

Connecticut and Rhode Island, having favors to ask, had been more prompt than Massachusetts to acknowl1661. edge the authority of Charles II. Winthrop for Connecticut, of which colony he was governor, and Clarke for Rhode Island, presented themselves at Charles's court in quest of charters. The season was propitious. The Restoration, at least for the moment, was a sort of era of good feeling. Winthrop might be subject to suspicion as the son-in-law of Hugh Peters; but his talents, his scientific acquirements-he was one of the founders of the Royal Society-and his suavity of address, secured him many friends. The aged Lord Say introduced him to some influential courtiers, and he seems to have 1662. encountered little difficulty in obtaining the charter April 23. which he sought. That instrument, following the terms of the old alleged grant to the Earl of Warwick, estah.