these Separatists * was peculiarly vulnerable. Baptist leaders found themselves embarrassed when called upon to certify to the Baptist affiliations of the Separatists; such a distasteful judgment of the motives and scruples of others was to be avoided wherever possible. 2 On the other hand, if the Separatists sought to set up churches and establish ministers of their own, they were confronted by the fact that a second Congregational church could not be formed in a parish without legislative permission, and the orthodox party usually showed itself capable of forestalling all such sanction on the part of the state. It was left, therefore, to the Separatists either for conscience' sake to bear the double burden of taxation, 3 or to seek a permanent religious home in one of the recognized dissenting bodies. 4
Five years later, when the exemption law of 1752 expired and with it the exemption laws that previously had been passed for the relief of the Quakers, a new law was enacted governing both sects. 5 Henceforth a Baptist who
- 1 Separatists or Separates were the names by which those were commonly designated who withdrew from the orthodox churches on account of the controversies occasioned by the Great Awakening. See Blake, S. Leroy, The Separates or Strict Congregationalists of New England, Boston, 1902, pp. 17 et seq.
- 2 Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, p. 171.
- 3 Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 96 et seq. Backus himself suffered imprisonment under this act. See ibid., p. 109.
- 4 Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut, pp. 235 et seq. The process of absorption referred to had much to do with the breaking up of the Separatist movement. Few of these congregations continued to exist until the struggle for religious freedom was fully won. 'Other contributory causes in the breaking up of the movement were the poverty of the members of these congregations, the difficulties they experienced in securing pastoral care, and the dissensions that arose among them in the exercise of their boasted rights of private judgment, public exhortation, and the interpretation of the Scriptures.
- 5 Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 140 et seq.
