isms and the shirking
of individual duty on the ground of dissent were alike discountenanced,
sometimes by severely intolerant measures. The ultimate collision of
these principles with the sturdy individualism that had been accepted
from the Separatists of Plymouth was inevitable. It came when the
"standing order" 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 "arguments of weight,"
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, "wherein dwelleth righteousness," was,
at the end of a hundred years from their planting, realized with a
completeness not common to such prophetic dreams.

So solid and vital, at the point of time which we have assumed (1730),
seemed the cohesion of the "standing order" in New England, that only
two inc