opalians, for the establishment of bishops
in the colonies under the authority of the Church of England. The
reasons for this measure were obvious and weighty; and the protestations
of those who promoted it, that they sought no advantage before the law
over their fellow-Christians, were doubtless sincere. Nevertheless, the
fear that the bringing in of Church of England bishops would involve the
bringing in of many of those mischiefs of the English church
establishment which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear
was a perfectly reasonable fear both to the Puritans of New England and
to the Presbyterians from Ireland. It was difficult for these, and it
would have been even more difficult for the new dignitaries, in colonial
days, to understand how bishops could be anything but lord bishops. The
fear of such results was not confined to ecclesiastics. The movement was
felt by the colonial statesmen to be dangerously akin to other British
encroachments on colonial rights. The Massachusetts Assembly instructed
its agent in London strenuously to oppose it. In Virginia, the
Episcopalian clergy themselves at first refused to concur in the
petition for bishops; and when at last the concurrence was voted, it was
in the face of a formal protest of four of the clergy, for which they
received a vote of thanks from the House of Burgesses.[207:1]

The alliance thus occasioned between the national synod of the
Presbyterian Church and the Congregationalist clergy of the little
colony of Connecticut seems like a disproportioned one. And so it was
indeed; for the Connecticut General Association was by far the larger
and stronger body of the two. By and by the disproportion was inverted,
and the alliance continued, with notable results.

FOOTNOTES:

[182:1] See G. P. Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine," pp. 394-418;
also E. A. Park in the "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," vol. iii., pp.
1634-38. The New England theology is not so called as being confined to
New England. Its leading "improvements on Calvinism" were accepted by
Andrew Fuller and Robert Hall among the English Baptists, and by
Chalmers of the Presbyterians of Scotland.

[184:1] Of what sort was the life of a church and its pastor in those
days is illustrated in extracts from the journal of Samuel Hopkins, the
theologian, pastor at Great Barrington, given in the Memoir by Professor
Park, pp. 40-43. The Sabbath worship was disturbed by the arrival of
warlike