Genealogical notes of Barnstable families - citizen hylbom blog

102 GENEALOGICAL NOTES OF BARNSTABLE FAMILIES.
settled till April 2, 1708, when an inventory thereof was made.
His house and lot were apprised at,
A piece of land lying between the lands of Israel Garrett,
£8,00
20,00
Lands above John Bodflsh's,
16,00
Meadow adjoining Town Neck,
35,00
do.
37,00
£116,00
All the real estate was assigned to Zachariah, he paying to
the heirs of his brother Job Jenkins, deceased, £46, and to his
sister, Elizabeth Jenkins, £52.
Zachariah married and had a large family. Job also married
and had issue. Elizabeth had not married in 1708. She
was then 59 years of age.
As this is not a Barnstable family I omit details. In the
Cudworth article I referred to this John Jenkins. His history is
an exceedingly interesting one. He was fined £19,10 shillings
for refusing to take the oath of fidelity, attending quaker meetings,
and other acts, involving no violation of the public peace, or any
immortality. The law requiring all able to bear arms, to take the
oath of fidelity, was an old law that had not, in 1658, been enforced
for several years, but as Gen. Cudworth, Isaac Robinson,
and others among the best men in the Colony averred, it was revived
and used as a trap in which to catch some persons who had
conscientious scruples against taking it. I reverence the character
of the Pilgrim Fathers ; but I will not therefore paliate or excuse
their faults. Their proceedings against Norton and other
Quakers at Plymouth are justifiable in law, because the Quakers
were the agressors. Norton would fare no better in a court of
justice to-day, than he did in 1658. The Quakers at Sandwich
were not generally the agressors. They asserted their rights as
citizens, and subjects of the British realm. In ecclesiastical mat-
ters they adopted the same broad and tolerant views that the Pilgrim
Fathers had always asserted and always maintained. They
held that the conscience was free ; that man was not responsible
to his fellow men in matters of faith, but to God alone. The
fundamental principles of the Congregational or Puritan polity
was, that a church should consist of as many members as could
conveniently meet together to worship, and that when they had
so met they had a right to elect their own teachers, elders and
other officers. Those rights were denied to Sandwich Quakers.
The history of John Jenkins, as found in the Colony records, in
Bishop and other writers, exemplifies the persecuting spirit which
had crept into the Colony in 1658, defacing the fair record of our
fathers.
To pay the fines which Jenkins conscientiously believed to be