Genealogical notes of Barnstable families - citizen hylbom blog

180 GENEALOGlOAt NOTES OF BARNSTABLE FAMILIES.
were not true christians—they warred against the forms and ceremonies
that the English church had borrowed from Rome, against
its Bishops and Archbishops, its prelatical rule, and claim to hind
men's consciences. They contended that the gospel should be
preached in its purity, as it was in the apostolitic times, before
councils and synods and forged creeds by which to bind men's
consciences; that the Bible was the only creed, and that christians
should "covenant with each other in the presence of Almighty
God, to walk together in all God's ways and ordinances,
according as He had already revealed, or should further make
known unto them, and to forsake all false ways;" that man was
hot responsible to his fellow man in matters of conscience, but to
God alone, and that the life is the evidence of faith, as the fruit
is of the goodness of the tree.
The first Baptist church, as already stated, was an offshoot
from Mr. Lothrop's church. They were then known as ana baptists,
and in England were persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and
put to death. In Massachusetts they were also imprisoned, put
in the stocks, whipped, and banished from the colony. Mr.
Lothrop, though he did not sanction immersion, never in London,
or Scituate, or Barnstable, refused them christian fellowship,
neither did any member of his church. The mode of baptism they
considered as non-essential, respecting which no christian had the
right to judge his brother.
When that hydra-headed monster, Quaker persecution,
stalked through New England Mr. Lothrop had gone to his flnal
rest. Had he been living, he would have stood side by side with
the ancient members of his church, Hatherly, Cudworth, Isaac
Robinson, John Smith,* and many others who had listened to his
teaching, and learned toleration in the school of persecution.
The beauty of the system of christian faith and practice
taught by Mr. Lothrop, commends itself to the common sense of
mankind. He was a Calvinist, but he followed John Calvin no
farther than Calvin followed the oracles of God. He maintained
not only the independence of the churches, but of the individual
members, asserting the manhood and equality of the race, and
laying the foundation of the christian church on its broadest Ijasts,
the individual heart.
Mr. John Lothrop, though he received the doctrines of the
reformed churches, and adopted the forms of church government
of the blessed John Robinson, was an independent thinker. He
received no doctrine on the faith of others, he examined for himself,
decided for himself. Though bold and decided in his denunciations
of the arbitrary acts of the bishops, he was as meek as
*I regret that I cannot add the name of Gov. Thomas Hinckley ; but no man more seriously
regretted his own course in after life than he did. He was not the severe man that
his opponents represented him to be. See "Hinckley" and "Cudwortli."