American James Smith Founded the Barrington

A SYNOPSIS OF PURITAN BELIEFS IN CONFLICT WITH NEW RELIGIONS

IN THE BEGINNING OF AMERICA

From The History of Barrington, Rhode Island by Thomas Williams Bickell, Snow and Farnham Printers, Providence, RI 1898. (Relevant passages with page #'s)

pg. 112-113. “Our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestry, the founders of Boston and Salem and Weymouth and Plymouth, came to America for several good and sufficient reasons; the principal one was to find comfortable rest from the deep political and religious unrest of the mother-land. … Men they were with a new revelation, heretics if you please, honest, sincere, devout, godly and tremendously in earnest. … These early New England people wished, as they thought they had the right, to be let alone as to religious concerns, and if not in Old England, then in New England. Toleration, to them, meant to be independent and undisturbed in their enjoyment of their religious principles and prerogatives. As to letting others alone, whose presence and influence seemed to them intolerant and to threaten their own quiet, was another matter. The Boston Puritan (including Rev. Mather) had no use in the seventeenth century for a Baptist, a Quaker, a Churchman or a Catholic. The presence of either on Boston soil was a menace to the solidarity of Puritanism, in which he implicitly believed. What he regarded as errors in religion was also considered treason to the commonwealth...

pg. 114-115. “Our fathers established a state church that they might express as strongly as a new society could its belief in homogeneity in all matters relating to the social, civil and religious order. . The New Englander's ideal government was church and state. ..The Bible was the best Statute Book for the Puritan; and Puritan divines, well-educated and learned, must be its supreme legal expounders. Hence Harvard College with its motto “ Christo et Ecclesiae”

pg. 117- 123. Because of Act of Uniformity (1662) passed by Charles II (after Cromwell), over 2,000 English left, including Rev. John Myles from Wales who went to Rehoboth. In 1663 he was charged for breach of (public) order when he and six others had a Baptist church meeting at a private home. They were fined and told to remove their meeting. They were allowed to purchase land and form the town of Swansea in 1667.

pg. 133 A law enacted in 1692 “Puritan Massachusetts expected each town to support by pubic tax the established order of Congregational churches. Baptist Swansea decided not to do so.” as they supported church by voluntary contributions. Swansea incorporated with broad principles of civil and religious freedom: it protected religious institutions but did not support them. Which led to Congregationalists (James Smith among them) to petition for a new town that did so they could have an 'able,learned and orthodox' minister. Thus Barrington. (Pg. 196)

Pg 135 “ One step was taken in their day from persecution to toleration. Later, toleration gave way to liberty whose dawn is now the hope of mankind.”

AMERICA: James Smith(Cong. in Swansea) group started Barrington for religious freedom (1717). Grandson Hezekiah started Baptist Church in Colrain and in 1872, g-g-g-g-grandson Henry Jonathan married Lelia Mather ,the g-g-g-g-g-granddaughter of Rev. Richard Mather.