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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
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