onsiderable defections are visible to the historian.

The tendency toward Baptist principles early disclosed itself among the
colonists. The example of Roger Williams was followed by less notable
instances; the shameful intolerance with which some of these were
treated shows how formidable this tendency seemed to those in authority.
But a more startling defection appeared about the year 1650, when
President Dunster of Harvard College, a man most honorable and lovable,
signified his adoption of the Baptist tenets. The treatment of him was
ungenerous, and for a time the petty persecutions that followed served
rather to discredit the clergy than really to hinder the spread of
Baptist principles. In the year 1718 the Baptist church of Boston
received fraternal recognition from the foremost representatives of the
Congregational clergy of Boston, with a public confession of the wrong
that they had done.[130:1] It is surprising to find, after all this
agitation and sowing of "the seed of the church," that in all New
England outside of Rhode Island there are in 1730 only six Baptist
churches, including (an honorable item) two Indian churches on the
islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.[131:1]

The other departure from the "standing order" was at this date hardly
more extensive. The early planting of Episcopalian churches in Maine and
New Hampshire, with generous patronage and endowment, had languished and
died. In 1679 there was no Episcopal minister in all New England. In
1702 were begun the energetic and richly supported missions of the "S.
P. G." At the end of twenty-eight years there were in Rhode Island four
Episcopalian churches; in Massachusetts, three, two of them in the city
of Boston; in Connecticut, three.[131:2] But in the last-named colony an
incident had occurred, having apparently no intimate connection with the
"Venerable Society's" missions, but charged with weighty, and on the
whole beneficent, consequences for the future of the kingdom of Christ
in America.

The incident was strikingly parallel to that of seventy years before,
when the president of Harvard College announced his acceptance of
Baptist principles. The day after the Yale commencement in September,
1722, a modest and respectful paper was presented to the trustees of the
college, signed by Rector Timothy Cutler and Tutor Brown (who
constituted the entire faculty of the college) and by five pastors of
good standing in the Connecticut churche