century was deepened by the bitterness of spirit which marked the last stages of the long struggle waged by dissenters to cut the bond between church and state. 1 The Congregational Church was one of the fundamental institutions of New England, and from the first the sword of the magistrate had been invoked to enforce conformity to its worship and polity. Strange enough seem the terms "Establishment" and "Standing Order" 2 in the history of a people whose forefathers came to America in quest of religious freedom. The freedom sought, however, was to be construed as loyalty to a new order rather than as the embodiment of tolerance. Thus it happened that for two whole centuries the battle on behalf of the rights of dissent had to be waged in New England. 3 To have this struggle construed by the aggrieved representatives of the Establishment as the crowning expression of what they had come to regard as the deep-seated and widespread irreligion of the
- 1 Lauer, Church and State in. New England (Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science. Tenth Series), pp. 95 et seq.
- 2 The term "Standing Order" was generally employed in the speech and literature of the period, and had reference to the alliance between the party of the Establishment and the party of the government.
- 3 The scope of inquiry prescribed by the special object of this dissertation renders both unnecessary and unprofitable the tracing of this struggle in detail. Valuable special studies in this field are available. Among these the following are to be commended as of exceptional usefulness: Burrage, A History of the Baptists in New England; Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut; Reed, Church and State in Massachusetts, 1691-1740; Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America; Ford, New England's Struggle for Religious Liberty. Lauer's excellent treatise has already been cited. Of contemporaneous treatments, Backus, A History of New England, with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians called Baptists, though deficient in literary merit, is doubtless the most trustworthy and replete. The citations made from the latter work refer, unless otherwise indicated, to the edition of 1871 (2 vols.).
