ment-depends a grand revolution, if not a general revolt, from schism in these parts." These three friends were all ordained by the Bishop of Norwich, in St. Martin's Church, London, both deacons and priests, in March, 1723.

Within

He

a week after their ordination, Brown, who had preached the day before, was seized with smallpox, that most dire disease of the period, which is said to have carried off one fifth of all those who crossed the sea for ordination. died on Easter even. His two friends, after visiting Oxford and Cambridge (both of which universities conferred upon Cutler the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and upon Johnson that of Master of Arts), were joined by James Wetmore, their fellow-signer, who was also ordained. Dr. Cutler and Mr. Johnson sailed for home in July, 1723. Cutler at once assumed charge of Christ Church in Boston, and Johnson proceeded to his mission in Stratford, Conn. Mr. Wetmore was sent to New York, being subsequently stationed at Rye, where he died of smallpox in 1760, after a successful ministry of thirty-seven years.

It was from this remarkable beginning that the church took vigorous root in Connecticut, though Johnson was the only one of the three converts who remained in that colony. He at once proceeded to Stratford, and by Christmas, 1724, he succeeded in completing the church which he found in process of building. This was the first edifice for the Church of England erected in Connecticut. His parish numbered some thirty families; but besides his ministrations in Stratford, Johnson cared for the church families, some forty or more, which he found scattered through the neighboring towns of Fairfield, Norwalk, Newtown, Ripton, and West Haven. He was the only church clergyman in the whole colony. He at once found the key to the situation, and appealed earnestly to the Bishop of London for a bishop for the colony. The church having

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now an organization in Stratford, the rector received numerous intimations from various quarters of a desire to have the church planted among them.

Daniel Shelton, a wealthy landed proprietor of Ripton (now Huntington), and a sturdy opponent of the tax for the State Establishment, subscribed largely for a minister in his town, and he was the representative of many who were like-minded elsewhere. There was naturally great repugnance to the introduction of the Episcopal regimen and liturgical worship on the part of those who had hoped for a quiet possession of the region, to which they had come, in great measure, to escape what had been to them the rigorous rule of prelacy at home. Their opposition was strenuous, often more strenuous than scrupulous; but it was an opposition to a system they disliked, not to men whom they discredited either for looseness of doctrine or laxity of life. It was an opposition not to aliens, but to friends and neighbors, children of the soil, whose conversion they deemed perversion. They held that the gospel was already sufficiently ministered to the population; and their opposition to the contributions of the Venerable Society (S. P. G.) for the spread of Episcopacy was grounded in the conviction that they were fostering a needless schism. Of course human passion mingled largely with doctrinal devotion, and the defense of dogmatism was so engrossing as often to overshadow, if not obliterate, the spiritual precepts of the Sermon on the Mount.

The ruling order stood for their rights and the churchmen stood for their liberties. "Traitor" and "bigot" were the fraternal terms by which ecclesiastical combatants saluted each other; and the new Episcopacy was destined to have the full benefit of a sharp discipline. The church in its childhood was not to be spoiled for lack of the rod of the Puritan parent, where it could be legally applied;

and the construction of the law, as well as the embarrassments of struggling parishes, gave sufficient opportunity for repressive treatment.

Still the church grew and throve from the start. It was no exotic; it was no intrusion of a state establishment. It arose out of sober conviction, and was characterized by sobriety of life. If it were more correct than profound in its religious life, it was at least correct. It was deemed formal, but it could not be deemed fanatical. It based its claim on the assurance of knowledge and the maintenance of temperance, not on the turbulent outburst of an illregulated enthusiasm. It strove to minister first to its hidden friends as they came to light, desiring to avail themselves of the worship of the Prayer-book, and then to extend itself to those whom the rigors of a strict Calvinism were hardening into indifference. It was a needed coun

terpoise, to say no more, to the tendency toward the harsh rigidity of theological systems, and to the excessive individuality of Congregational independency. The appeal of its claims was historic, and the tenor of its discipline was communal rather than individual. It became, therefore, a refuge from the parochial tyranny of both pastor and people. The liberty of its household was protected by law, and that not the law of an isolated congregation. It emphasized the sacraments, the monuments of God's grace given, rather than individual experience in the ictic reception of that grace. Its religious life was deemed a development, and not a separate creation in each case. "Nurture," rather than "conversion," was its watchword. An historic system took the place in it of an inorganic spiritual discipline.

Johnson was fitted, both by nature and his spiritual experience among the Congregationalists, to be the father of the church movement. He knew the good qualities and

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possessions of his opponents, and he also understood their lack. His benevolence of temper preserved him from rancor, and his calmness of soul saved him from irritation. in controversy. He went steadily on his way, and always elicited respect, even when his principles were denounced. Some of the more strenuous of his Episcopal brethren called him once to account for sending his son to Yale College, because there he must attend extemporaneous prayers offered in the chapel by Congregational ministers. Johnson answered that he was not called to forego the education of his son, in the only place in the colony where he could get it, for attending prayers which, however incomplete, were not injurious, and which only intensified his son's love and preference for the devotions of the Prayer-book.

The relations of Johnson to his alma mater were always those of a filial and devoted son. It was he who, on a last visit to Dean Berkeley, before his departure for England, recommended the college to his friendly notice, "not having any further view than to hope he might send it some good books." The good dean responded liberally to the suggestion: He gave to his clerical friends the books he had brought over with him, and made a donation of all his own works to the college, and, aided by others, sent, after his return home, nearly a thousand volumes to its library. This, according to President Clap's estimate, "constituted the finest collection of books that had then ever been brought at one time to America." It was through Johnson, also, that the dean transmitted a deed conveying to the trustees of the college his Rhode Island farm of ninety-six acres, still in possession of the instituOut of this broad-minded recognition of the value of the college, Johnson gained an influence there which led many of the graduates to enter the ministry of the

tion.

church, and thus gave to its infant struggles the support of an educated clergy.

One of the earliest of these learned recruits was Henry Caner, who graduated at Yale in 1724, to whom Johnson became theological instructor for three years, until he went abroad for ordination in 17-27. After that he had him appointed missionary in Fairfield, the town adjoining Stratford. Here Caner assiduously ministered, and incorporated a church, the second in the colony, and extended his labors to the neighboring towns, such as Norwalk, Stamford, and Greenwich. Prayer-books and other religious publications were circulated, and the efforts to discover families favorable to the church, wherever they might be, were unremitting. These were found in Newtown, Redding, Ridgefield, and Danbury. Johnson also visited New Haven, New London, and Wethersfield.

Thus the movement spread. A great hindrance to it was the tax levied by the colony for the support of the churches of the Standing Order, which was a heavy addition to the voluntary contributions of churchmen for maintaining their own parishes. In the first five years of Johnson's ministrations in Stratford, eleven church families moved into New York for this sole reason. The wardens and vestrymen of Fairfield memorialized the General Assembly in 1727 to remove this burden; and in consequence a law was enacted permitting the taxes of churchmen to be applied to the minister of the Church of England, if there were one sufficiently near them to permit of their attending his ministrations. Parishioners of the Church of England were also excused from paying taxes for the building of meeting-houses for the churches of the colony. The law, however, was rendered in many cases nugatory by the construction put upon it. "Sufficient nearness

to the church was defined to be a distance within a mile