Principles Established in Rhode Island

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 216-226
Author(s):  
R. E. E. Harkness
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Roger Williams ◽  
The Church

Roger Williams is justly famous in history as the Pioneer Statesman of Religious Liberty. He can never be robbed of this distinction and honor. But it is not the only cause for which he should be famous. According to the well known story, arriving in Massachusetts Bay Colony on February 5, 1631, he declined an invitation to become minister of the Boston Church because it was constituted of “an unseparated people,” still holding fellowship with the Church of England, and because the civil magistrates of the Bay punished for breaches of the First Table, that is exerted authority in religious affairs. After years of controversy with the authorities of the Bay, sentence of banishment was passed upon him in October, 1635, and in January, 1636, he was forced to leave its jurisdiction. Reaching the Narragansett country, he established the Providence Community and later Rhode Island Colony.

Record-Keeping and Other Troublemaking: Thomas Lechford and Law Reform in Colonial Massachusetts

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Vain Attempt ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
The Church

Historians have long discussed the different ways in which the first professional lawyer to practice in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Lechford, was at odds with colony authorities in his three-year stay there—from June 27, 1638 to August 3, 1641. Some accounts have focused on his religious views, since Lechford disagreed with the strict forms of church membership prescribed by the colony's religion, Congregationalism. When he returned to England, Lechford wrote a book called Plain Dealing in which he argued against this form of religious organization, claiming that he had received enough first-hand experience to recommend a return to the Church of England. This book has been an important source of information on religious and political arrangements in colonial Massachusetts, and so for many, the picture of Lechford as religious dissenter is familiar. Another important picture of Lechford, especially familiar to historians of the American legal profession, is Lechford the impecunious lawyer disbarred for the unethical practice of law. Lechford himself had written, “I am…forced to get my living by writing petty things, which scarce finds me bread.” He had been disbarred for “embracery,” pleading to a jury out of court, and it was assumed that this combination of circumstances forced him to return to England. James Savage wrote under his biographical entry for Lechford: “left here, aft. vain attempt to earn bread.” Other nineteenth-century scholars of colonial Massachusetts said much the same thing. William Whitmore, in an introduction to a collection of Massachusetts colonial laws, wrote that Lechford “was finally starved into returning to England.”

Plymouth and the Bay

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Francis J. Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
The North ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Church

During the 1620s the colony faced various challenges, some centering on a settlement to the north that came to be dominated by Thomas Morton. Morton was accused of selling guns and liquor to Natives and carrying on revels around a maypole he had erected. Plymouth sent Myles Standish and a small armed force to arrest Morton, and they sent him back to England. In 1628 the first settlers of what was to be the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in Salem. These puritans were not separatists but turned to Plymouth for advice on how to organize their religious life. Samuel Fuller, Plymouth’s physician and a deacon of the church, visited Salem to aid those suffering from scurvy, but also persuaded John Endecott, the settlement’s leader, of the congregational principles on which the Plymouth congregation was based. The Salem settlers thereafter drew up their own covenant and subsequently chose their own ministers.

Dissent in New England

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-266
Author(s):  
Francis J. Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
New Order ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Anne Hutchinson ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
New England Colonies ◽  
Roger Williams ◽  
The Church

The New England colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century by men and women who could not in conscience subscribe to all aspects of the faith and practice of the Church of England. In creating new societies they struggled with how to define their churches and their relationship with the national Church they dissented from. As their New England Way evolved the orthodox leaders of the new order identified and took action against those who challenged it. Interaction with dissenters such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers helped to further define the colonial religious establishment.

“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Winship
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Government

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740) Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

The British theological world was stirred at the beginning of the eighteenth century by what the learned and staunchly orthodox Presbyterian historian James Seaton Reid has called “latitudinarian notions on the inferiority of dogmatic belief and the nature of religious liberty.” In the 1690s John Locke had published his Reasonableness of Christianity and Letters on Toleration, followed by John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious. In 1710 “Honest Will” Whitson, Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was expelled from the University for embracing Arian views. His departure was accompanied by rumors—long since substantiated—about his great predecessor's heterodox theology. Traditional theologians were shocked next by the appearance of Dr. Samuel Clark's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity which resulted in the author's arraignment before Convocation of the Church of England in 1714. The very same year John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, was first tried before the General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church for teaching Arian and Pelagian errors. In 1729, after three more trials, Simson was suspended from his professorship for denying the numerical oneness of the Trinity. Fierce doctrinal contentions also began to occupy English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, erupting during the famous Salters’ Hall meeting early in 1719.

New England

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
New Haven ◽  
The World ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter focuses mainly on developments in the law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded as a Puritan utopia to display to rest of the world how a society should be governed. Although Massachusetts incorporated elements of the common law into its legal system, the dominant source of law was the word of God. But the divine word, which was enforced by the magistrates of the Court of Assistants, sometimes met resistance from local juries. A major issue throughout the 1630s and 1640s was whether the magistrates or local people would have final authority to determine the substance of the law; the issue was resolved in 1649 by providing for appeals in all cases of judge-jury disagreement to the General Court sitting as a unicameral body in which representatives of localities outnumbered the magistrates and thus had final authority. The chapter ends with a brief look at legal developments in Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Rhode Island.

Hatred, Sexual Orientation, Free Speech and Religious Liberty

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Church ◽  
Partial Success

In recent years, the clash between supporters of religious liberty and sexual orientation equality legislation has led to repeated battles both in Parliament and the courts. First came the clashes over the scope of exemptions in employment discrimination legislation for religious groups. The UK Regulations dealing with employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation give a limited exception for ‘employment for purposes of an organised religion’, which allows an employer to apply a requirement related to sexual orientation to comply with the doctrines of the religion, or to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion's followers. A legal challenge brought to the scope of this exception was unsuccessful but, despite that, the exemption has not averted damaging findings of discrimination against the Church of England. The Bishop of Hereford was held to have discriminated unlawfully in blocking the appointment of a practising homosexual to a youth-officer post within the Church of England. The partial success of religious groups in achieving exemption was followed by defeat in the equivalent regulations dealing with discrimination in goods and services, made under the Equality Act 2006, despite the claims of Catholic adoption agencies that they would rather close than place children with same-sex couples.

“Hee Had Lost a Great Many Men in the Warr”

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Jenny Hale Pulsipher
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Plymouth Colony ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Northern New England

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

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