utterly refused to grant him any kind of dismission; and, after long and tedious correspondence, would only passively acquiesce in letting him do as he pleased. They adopted the language of the saints at Cesarea, when Paul would not desist from going to Jerusalem ;-" When he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done."

At the same time his settlement at Boston was vigorously opposed by a minority of the members of the church, many of them persons of note and eminence. They were warm upholders of the Synod; and, of course, were vehemently opposed to coming under the ministry of the leading divine on the other side of the question, which then was "the most exciting topic of the day." Their resistance was unavailing. Mr. Davenport and Mr. James Allen were, on the ninth of December, 1668, installed as co-pastors of the First Church.

The disaffected members, to the number of twenty-eight, withdrew, and were organized at Charlestown into what in now known as the Old South Church. This division produced a long and disturbing contest between these two churches, in which most of the ministers and churches in the colony took part. Seventeen VOL. II. 25

ministers, probably of the council at Charlestown, gave their public testimony against the proceedings of the First Church, and especially of the pastors, Davenport and Allen, and ruling-elder James Penn. The old church published a reply. Some of the members of the new church appear to have been fined and imprisoned for the supposed irregularity of their proceedings. The whole colony was drawn into the contest. Governor Bellingham, who was a member of the First Church, espoused its cause with zeal. Of this we find an instance preserved among the Massachusetts Records. In 1669, his pastor, Mr. Davenport, preached the Annual Election Sermon, which was published. In this, he expressed his sentiments on the controverted point. The Deputies who, in that Court, favored his views, were for passing the customary vote of thanks for the discourse. The Magistrates or Assistants, who formed the other branch, hearing of the pending vote, sent a communication, on the twenty-fifth of May, 1669, to the Deputies about it, saying that they "conceive the same to be altogether unseasonable, many passages in the said sermon, being ill-resented by the reverend elders of other churches and persons present; and, therefore, they would

forbear further proceeding therein." The Secretary of the "upper house," Edward Rawson, attests, that the Governor, who was the presiding officer, and who agreed with the Deputies in sentiment, refused to put this resolve to the vote; and so the vote was taken by Mr. Bradstreet, who was called by the Magistrates so to do. The Deputies, of course, did as they pleased in the premises. The next year also, Governor Bellingham tried in vain to get the Council of Magistrates to unite with him in measures for preventing the erection of the new house of worship. But though he had no success in that quarter, he was warmly supported by the Deputies; who, at their session in May, 1670, censured the formation of the new church as "irregular, illegal and disorderly." Great agitation was the result; and parties were organized among the people at large. The next election turned upon this point; and the new house of Deputies, at the petition of many of the ministers, annulled the censure. Thus the new church triumphed at last. The origin of all this disturbance, and this ardor in favor of the HalfWay Covenant, was political. According to the basis of the government as it then stood, none could be freemen of the colony, entitled to vote

and be voted for, except such as were members of some church acknowledged by the laws of the land. The Half-Way Covenant was intended to bring in a multitude of church-members, who could be admitted in no other way; and who thus became capable of admission to all the civil privileges of the colony. This was the object of most of the Synodists. Mr. Davenport, with the Anti-synodists, was for keeping up the primitive order, both in church and commonwealth. With him, it was altogether a religious question; with the Synodists, it was, in great part, a question of civil rights, though they too rested their defence mostly on considerations of a religious kind.

Thus the connection between the Church and State, though at first intended for the advantage and security of the former, resulted in its corruption. And it is singular, that most of the laws which were framed, at intervals, to favor the Orthodox and Congregational order, in the process of time and change, came to operate against that order with ruinous effect, till the last of those laws was repealed in 1834. The history of Congregationalism in Massachusetts is an instructive commentary on such laws, and proves their pernicious and disastrous bearing

upon the communities which they are designed to favor. By no people on earth would the union of Church and State be more strenuously resisted than by the good people of Massachusetts, whose experience has bitterly taught them the impolicy of such measures.

The contentions between the First and Third Churches of Boston were sharp and violent. We have not room to give the particulars. Suffice it to say, that, after fourteen years of strife, the First Church and the Old South were happily reconciled. It is a matter of serious meditation, that the First Church, in those days, represented the primitive and high-toned orthodoxy of the land; while the Third, or, as we now say, Old South Church, was considered as leaning toward a laxer discipline.

Mr. Davenport's ministry, which had lasted nearly twenty years in London, and nearly thirty years in New Haven, was of short duration at Boston. "It is ill transplanting a tree that thrives in the soil." In less than two years after his last removal, he died very suddenly, of apoplexy, on the fifteenth of March, 1670, being seventy-two years of age. He was buried with every testimonial of respect in the tomb of the venerated Cotton.