desired exemption must have his name upon a list to be presented annually to the assessor and signed by the minister and three principal members of the Baptist congregation to which the applicant belonged, with the accompanying certification that the applicant was recognized as a conscientious and faithful Baptist. Quakers were placed under the same regulations. For thirteen years this law was in operation, with manifold instances of distress resulting, particularly in the case of Baptists. 1 Through difficulty in obtaining the certificates, goods were seized, expensive and otherwise irritating court trials were held, and not a few victims, either because of poverty or on account of conscientious scruples, found their way to prison. In some instances, despite the fact that the certificates were duly obtained and presented, they were waved aside and the payment of the tax required or the process of distraint invoked. 2 It is little wonder that the feeling in the minds and hearts of New England Baptists that there was a spiirt of iniquity back of the oppressive measures of the Standing Order, came to have all the significance of a settled conviction.*
- 1 Backus, op. cit., p. 141.
- 2 Ibid.
- 3 Cf. Minutes of the Warren Association for 1769, quoted by Burrage, History of the Baptists in New England, pp. 108 et seq. Cf. the following, taken from a statement and appeal to Baptists, in the Boston Evening Post, Aug. 20, 1770: "To the Baptists in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who are, or have been, oppressed in any way on a religious account. It would be needless to tell you that you have long felt the effects of the laws by which the religion of the government in which you live is established. Your purses have felt the burden of ministerial rates; and when these would not satisfy your enemies, your property hath been taken from you and sold for less than half its value. . . . You will therefore readily hear and attend when you are desired to collect your cases of suffering, and have them well attested; such as, the taxes you have paid to build meeting-houses, to settle ministers and support them, with all the time, money and labor you have lost in waiting on courts, feeing lawyers, &c.; and bring or send such cases to the Baptist Association to be held at Bellingham; when measures will be resolutely adopted for obtaining redress from another quarter than that to which repeated application hath been made unsuccessfully. Nay, complaints, however just and grievous, hath been treated with indifference, and scarcely, if at all credited". (Quoted by Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, p. 155.)
