[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.and.open enemies to the government itself.Blasphemy was a capital offense under Massachusetts law.The Quaker challenge tothe authority of government to enforce religious conformity, more than Quaker doc-trine itself, underlay tragic events in 1660.Ignoring warnings that she would be ex-ecuted if she returned and did not recant, Dyer led three Quakers back into Boston,where according to a supporter,  she spake the words that the Lord spake in her.Unmoved by her witness, the General Court convicted and hanged her.American Puritans and the English Civil WarsThe irony of Massachusetts s suppression of religious dissent within its borderswas that the dissidents challenge to the authority of the magistrates and ministersin Massachusetts echoed a parallel struggle Puritans waged against the crown andthe established church in England in the 1630s.When the civil wars erupted andlater, during the interregnum, Puritans played a vital role in Parliament.Throughoutall these events, Puritans in England called to their brethren in New England to re-turn.Some, like the Reverend Hugh Peter, did, but the vast majority remained in theirnew homes.The founders of New England had committed themselves to the reform of the En- A NEW ENGLAND 183glish church, a purpose the next generation of American Puritans had to reformu-late in order to justify their decision not to return to the home country in its travail.The rationale recast the very essence of their original mission.They no longer por-trayed themselves as models for others to follow but as those chosen to build the newJerusalem.Still part of the transatlantic Puritan community, they were no longer apeople motivated by the example of the flight of the Jews from Egypt, but the rein-carnation of those refugees.The Atlantic became the Red Sea, and Charles I a newpharaoh.Having decided to stay, the Puritans faced new and unanticipated doctrinal prob-lems.The most vexing of these was the problem of church membership for their chil-dren and grandchildren.The founders of New England had chosen to cross the sea.Whether they were saints or not, they were volunteers.To reinforce the notion, theyhad added to their church rules a new codicil.Those who came after them wouldhave to recite, before the minister and the congregation, some experience of graceto become full members of a church, in effect, become  visible saints. Full mem-bers could take communion and baptize their children.But would congregations allow the baptism of children of those adults who couldnot or had not been able to narrate an experience of grace? Without baptism, the chil-dren would be exposed to the devil and hell.Without the assurance of baptism oftheir children, those who were not in full membership would bolt the church.In asynod that led to the Cambridge Platform of 1648, the ministers confronted the prob-lem of making a uniform policy on church membership.They agreed that they hadthe duty and the authority to announce such a policy a step away from the controlof individual churches by their congregants then failed to come up with a formula.A majority of the ministers would have conceded to a more liberal policy of baptism,but powerful members of their churches objected to such liberality, and worse, to asynod of ministers telling the members of a congregation who could join their fel-lowship.When the ministers met in 1657, they again tried to frame a policy for the baptismof nonmembers children and this time proposed that children of members, afterthey turned sixteen, had to bring their own offspring to church for baptism.Thusthe second generation could be halfway members and able to gain baptism for thethird generation, their children, but not able to vote for ministers or take commu-nion until they could fulfill the confessional requirement for full membership.Thenew proposal hung fire until another synod, in 1662, authorized the  halfway cove-nant by a simple majority vote.No synod s output ever gained universal approval,however, and some ministers and congregations never did buy into the idea of ahalfway covenant. 184 WORLDS I N MOTI ONhiving outWhile the ministers were fretting and their congregants battling over doctrine, NewEnglanders spread into the interior and along the coasts of New England,  hivingout like a colony of bees.The town system of government proved itself an adapt-able framework for expansion.Massachusetts authorities tried to retain control ofall the new towns, with some success.Massachusetts annexed Portsmouth, on thecoast of New Hampshire, in 1643, and Kittery and York, on the southern coast ofMaine, in 1651.(New Hampshire became a royal colony in 1680; Maine remained aprovince of Massachusetts until 1820.) But the distances of some of the towns fromBoston stretched too far for the General Court to oversee them, and the founders ofsome of the new towns were antagonistic to the ruling party in Boston.Towns inConnecticut and Rhode Island gained independence from Massachusetts in the late1630s.ConnecticutIn a wholesale removal beginning in 1635, many of the townspeople of Newtown(now Cambridge), Massachusetts, led by minister Thomas Hooker, relocated to thebroad, grassy meadows of the upper Connecticut River and called their town Hart-ford [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • funlifepok.htw.pl

    •