Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

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missionary work for the "organizing and settling the Church of England
in Connecticut." ^ He early made a point of asking only for "equal privi-
leges and protection."" Before the law, however, which, in his native
colony, and, in general, throughout New England, required rates from all
tax-payers for the support of the Congregational worship and ministry, a
Church of England man could not stand on an equal footing with his
Congregational neighbor. Nor was there anything more inequitable in
this than in the reverse condition of things in the mother-country.
Congregationalism was, indeed, "established" in New England; and
those who did not conform to it were truly, in the Anglican sense,
Dissenters. Moreover, if there were rules made, in the course of time,
for the internal government of the infant College of the colony, which
tended to exclude Episcopalians from sharing its privileges, what could an
Anglican churchman then have to say against this, without at the same
time condemning the exclusiveness of the Universities of the mother-
country, which shut out those whose consciences forbade their signing
the Thirty-nine Articles ? If, indeed, we leave out of account all consid-
erations of legal status, there is no denying that there was an illiberality
of feeling, on the part of both clergy and laity of the established
Congregational order, which ought never to have existed. Yet what
wonder was it that they found it hard to bear the coming among them
of men who even in New England did not hesitate to call all non-
Anglicans by the name of Dissenters and Separatists, as, for example, when
Johnson himself, in 1742, reviewing his missionary work, wrote as follows :
" Upon the whole I can truly say, and thank God for it, my prudence has always
directed me and always shall, to avoid anything that could show the least favorable
disposition towards the separation as such, or to obstruct the growth of the Episcopal
Church." "
In later years the Anglicans of America took yet higher ground.
" Id., p. 54-
" Id., p. 98. " Id., p. 114.
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