human
encountered the Baptist and the Quaker conscience. It came again when the missionaries of the English established church, with singular unconsciousness of the humor of the situation, pleaded the sacred right of dissenting and the essential injustice of compelling dissenters to support the parish church.[129:1] The protest may have been illogical, but it was made effective by
gpt
backed by all the force of the British government. The exclusiveness of the New England theocracies, already relaxed in its application to other sects, was thenceforth at an end. The severity of church establishment in New England was so far mitigated as at last to put an actual premium on dissent. Holding still that every citizen is bound to aid in maintaining the institutions of public worship, it relieved any one of his assessment for the support of the parish church upon his filing a certificate that he was contributing to the support of another congregation, thus providing that any disaffection to the church of the town must be organized and active. It was the very euthanasia of establishment. But the state-church and church-state did not cease to be until they had accomplished that for New England which has never been accomplished elsewhere in America--the dividing of the settled regions into definite parishes, each with its church and its learned minister. The democratic autonomy of each church was jealously guarded, and yet they were all knit together by terms of loose confederation into a vital system. The impracticable notion of a threefold ministry in each church, consisting of pastor, teacher, and ruling elder, failed long before the first generation had passed; but, with this exception, it may justly be said that the noble ideal of the Puritan fathers of New England of a Christian state in the New World,