s. Two other pastors of note
were named as assenting to the paper, although not subscribing it. It
seemed a formidable proportion of the Connecticut clergy. The purport of
the paper was to signify that the signers were doubtful of the
validity, or persuaded of the invalidity, of presbyterial as
distinguished from episcopal ordination. The matter was considered with
the gravity which it merited, and a month later, at the time of the
meeting of the colonial legislature, was made the subject of a public
discussion, presided over with great dignity and amenity by Governor
Gurdon Saltonstall, formerly pastor of the church in New London. The
result was that, of the seven pastors assenting to the paper of the two
college men, only two adhered to them; but one of these two was that
able and excellent Samuel Johnson, whose later career as president of
King's College in New York, as well as the career of his no less
distinguished son, is an ornament to American history both of church and
state.

This secession, small in number, but weighty in character, was of course
a painful shock to the hitherto unbroken unity of the church and clergy
of Connecticut. But it was not quite like a thunderbolt from a clear
sky. It had been immediately preceded by not a little conference and
correspondence with Connecticut pastors on the one hand, and on the
other hand with representatives of the powerful and wealthy Propagation
Society, on the question of support to be received from England for
those who should secede. Its prior antecedents reached farther back into
history. The Baptist convictions of the president of Harvard in 1650
were not more clearly in line with the individualism of the Plymouth
Separatists than the scruples of the rector of Yale in 1722 were in line
with the Nationalism of Higginson and Winthrop. This sentiment,
especially strong in Connecticut, had given rise to much study as to the
best form of a colonial church constitution; and the results of this had
recently been embodied (in 1708) in the mildly classical system of the
Saybrook Platform. The filial love of the Puritan colonists toward the
mother church of England was by no means extinct in the third
generation. Alongside of the inevitable repugnance felt and manifested
toward the arrogance, insolence, and violence with which the claims of
the Episcopal Church were commended by royal governors and their
attaches and by some of the imported missionaries, there is ample