New England Church ' Relations^ and Continuity in Early Congregational History
New England Church ' Relations^ and Continuity in Early Congregational History BY RAYMOND PIIINEAS STEARNS AND DAVID HOLMKS BRAWNER N HIS ground-breaking study of early Engiish dissenters, I ChampHn Barrage announced a half-century ago that the "beginnings of Independency or Congregationalism, are not, as heretofore, traced to the Brownists or Barrowists, but to the Congregational Puritanism advocated by Henry Jacob and William Bradshaw about 1604 and 1605, and later put in practice by various Puritan congregations on the Continent, when it was brought to America and back into England."^ This evolutionary scheme, as developed and substantiated in later studies, has by now acquired considerable authority. The late Perry Miller's Orthodoxy in Aíassachiíseits was ''a development of the hints" received from Burrage and others; Charles M. Andrews adopted a simiiar point of view; and in 1947 Professor Thomas JeiTer- son Wertenbaker went so far as to write that ''before the end of the reign of James Í, English Congregationalism, the Congregationalism which was transplanted in New England, had assumed its final form."- Obviously, the Burrage thesis has proved a boon to his- torians in that it provided a framework within which they ^ Thi Early English DlnenUrs in the Light of Recent Research, I$¡o~i64^i (3 vols., Cam- bridge, England, I'.Jiz), I, 33. "^ Orikodoxy in Massachuseiis, i6^^o-i6so {Cambridge, NTass., 1933), p. sv; Andrews, The Colonial P/^rizd i-ij American History {4 vois., New Haven, 1934--193S), I, 379, o. 2; Wertcnbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy {KKVÍ York, n.d.), p. 26. 14 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, have been able to work out the early history of non-separat- ing Congregationalism as a continuous development, inde- pendent of the Separatist movement.
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