aristocracy of
the fully regenerate. As a partial remedy for the evils arising out of
this democratization of religion and church government, a closer union
of the churches under ministerial supervision was advocated, and finally
adopted in Connecticut under the name of "Consociation." But the scheme
was defeated in Massachusetts; and it is significant that the men who
defeated it, no friends, many of them, of the Half-Way Covenant,
appealed to that very democratic principle of which the Half-Way
Covenant was a practical application. It was a son of Cotton Mather who
warned the people of the churches never blindly to "resign themselves to
the direction of their ministers; but consider themselves, as men, as
Christians, as Protestants, obliged to act and judge for themselves in
all the weighty concernments of Religion." To resign themselves to their
ministers was thought, indeed, to be but the first step backward toward
Anglican oppression and Papal tyranny.

A far more profound opponent of ecclesiastical aristocracy was the
Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich. He belongs to that illustrious minority
which stood out against the witchcraft delusion. Fined and imprisoned
upon one occasion for leading his town to refuse the collection of
taxes not imposed by a representative assembly, he was a proper man to
declare that "power is originally in the people." As men are "all
naturally free and equal," civil government "is the effect of human
free-compacts and not of divine instigation." And "if Christ has settled
any form of power in his Church he has done it for the benefit of every
member. Then he must needs be presumed to have made choice of that
government as should least expose the people to hazard, either from
fraud, or arbitrary measures of particular men. And it is as plain as
daylight, there is no species of government like a democracy to attain
this end." So argued the Ipswich preacher in 1717. Fifty years later,
his _Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches_, too
radical for his own day, was seen to be the very thing needed; in 1772,
when "consociation" had broken down even in Connecticut, when
Anglicanism was associated in men's minds with royal oppression, and
when political and religious liberty seemed destined to stand or fall
together, then the work of John Wise was reprinted and two editions were
exhausted within the year.

Accompanying the endeavor to find a common theoretical basis for Church