CHURCH HISTORY

• Main Author: Seaver, Paul S
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Santa Rosa Cambridge University Press 01.12.2013
• Subjects: Charters; Cotton; English language; Governors; Learning transfer; Politics; Presbyterian churches; Puritanism; Religious congregations; Religious organizations; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US; Massachusetts; Massachusetts Bay; England
• ISSN: 0009-6407; 1755-2613
• DOI: 10.1017/S0009640713001364

[...]as John Endicott, the future governor of the Bay Colony, wrote to Samuel Fuller of Plymouth, testifying that he was "satisfied touching your judgments of the outward forme of Gods worshipe" (142), in the final analysis Plymouth, Salem, and Boston all agreed that the pattern for their churches, separatist and non-separatist, was necessarily based on the example provided by the New Testament churches. From the outset Massachusetts Bay presented a more complex problem, as Winship shows, first, of transforming a chartered company, theoretically answerable to the King and Privy Council of England, into a government free of outside interference (relatively easy at a distance of 3,000 miles from an English government facing multiple problems of its own), and, second, of transforming an oligarchic structure of a company governor and assistants into a government compatible with colonists rapidly forming covenanted churches in which the godly laity participated in forming the covenant and in electing their ministers and elders. The puritans' recent experience of a monarch who arrested those who opposed the forced loans and then, having signed the Petition of Right, continued to collect taxes not granted by Parliament on the grounds of necessity while imprisoning those London merchants who refused to pay provided a dramatic political lesson in the costs of tyranny. [...]there was no question that the oligarchic company charter would survive unchanged.