but more largely to the degree of oversight of the religious life of the people, unusual even for Puritan New England, which the General Court of Connecticut exercised from the first. 1 In this connection it is to be observed that the impulses that lay back of the oppression of dissenters in Connecticut were not the same as those that shaped the situation in Massachusetts. The founders of Connecticut were out of sympathy with the theocratic ideal that prevailed in the mother colony; they frowned upon the harsh measures of repression which the authorities of Massachusetts adopted. 2 They held before them the ideal of a state wherein the maintenance of religion and the exercise of individual freedom should not be incompatible.
Yet as the event proved, the hand of religious tyranny fell heavily upon their posterity. 3 This happened, not because they were disposed to exercise harsher repressive measures than their fathers in curbing dissent, but because, in their extraordinary devotion to the churches of their own order, in their extreme care and watchfulness to strengthen them and to safeguard the whole range of their interests, they came into open conflict with the interests of dissenting bodies. 4 As early as 1669 the Congregational church was
- 1 Cobb, op. tit., pp. 244, 246.
- 2 Ibid., pp. 240 et seq.', Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut, pp. 62 et seq., 68.
- 3 It was the judgment of Isaac Backus that "oppression was greater in Connecticut, than in other governments in New England ". (History of New England, vol. ii, p. 404.)
- 4 Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America, p. 244. Cobb's statement concerning the lack of harshness and ungentleness which characterized the attitude of the supporters of the state church toward dissent is extreme. The controlling spirit of the Standing Order was doubtless a positive concern for the welfare of the Establishment rather than a desire to weed out dissent; but the clash of interests became so sharp and bitter that motives did not remain unmixed, and in many an instance dissent in Connecticut was compelled to reckon with a spirit of actual persecution.
