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Show are underwritten. . . .' reads the Mayflower Compact of 1620, ‘having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country , a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutuall y in the presence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid. . . .' The Church was also formally constituted, as at Salem 1629: 'We covenant with the Lord and one with another; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.’ The official religion, set out in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, was based on the English Westminster Confession of 1643-5, and was Independent rather than Presbyterian that is, councils and synods had advisory and admonitory powers, but no coercive authority. But there was no toleration either: the magistrates or ‘nursing fathers’ were to tackle heresy, schism and disobedience, 'to be restrai ned and punished by civil authority’. A man could not be a member of the State without being a member of the Church, exactly as in medieval society, since the beliefs and objects of the two were necessarily identica l. As Uriah Oakes, later President of Harvard, put it (1673): According to the design of our fathers and the frame of things laid by them, the interests of righteousness in the commonwealth and holiness in the churches are inseparable. . . . to divide what God hath joined . . . is folly in its exaltation. | look upon this as a little model of the glorious kingdom of Christ on earth. Christ reigns among us in the commonwealth as well as in the church and hath his glorious interest involved and wrap up in the good of both societies respectively. Was New England, then, to expand into a gigantic Geneva? Not exactly. It was not a theocracy. It gave the clergy themselves less actual authority than any other government in the western world at the time. The minister's power lay in determining Church membership. Moreover, the churches were, right from the start, managed by laymen. The religious establishment was popular, not hieratic. This was the foundation of the distinctive American religious tradition. There was never any sense of division in law between layman and cleric, between those with spiritual privileges and those without - no jealous juxtaposition and confrontation of a secular and ecclesiastical world. America was born Protestant, and did not have to become so through revolt and struggle. It was not built on the remains of a Catholic Church, or an Establishment; it had no clericalism or anti-clericalism. In all these respects it differed profoundly from a world shaped by Augustinian principles. It had a tradition less tradition, starting afresh with a set of Protestant assumptions, taken for granted, self-evident, as the basis for a common national creed. In any case, the idea of a gigantic Geneva was quickly rendered impossible by events. A Calvinist Church-State could not maintain itself without a terrifying apparatus of repression: even Geneva had had to expel people. Some of the problems of the Old World rapidly reproduced themselves in the New. Dissidents like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson emerged, were ejected and took refuge in the future Rhode Island, termed by the orthodox ‘the sewer of New England’. Founding Providence, Williams wrote: 'l desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.’ In 1644 he published his defense of religious freedom, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience Discussed, and his new instrument of government declared that ‘the form of government established in Providence Plantations is DEMOCRA TICAL, that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part, of the free inhabitants.’ To its laws and penalties for transgressions, it added: ‘And otherwise than thus, what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, everyone in the name of his God. And let the saints of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation, in the name of Jehovah their God, for ever and ever.' This was confirmed by royal charter in 1663: 'No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said 108 |