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The Rogerines, though strictly orthodox in the fundamental articles of the Christian faith, were opposed by the Connecticut magistrates as teachers of doctrines tending to undermine religion, as a persistently rebellious sect, and as notorious breakers of the peace. In faith and practice, these Rogerines bore some resemblance to the Baptists and also to the Quakers.
Rogers, with less dignity and more pugnaciousness, called the authorities "the scarlet beast" and the Establishment a "harlot," hurling scriptural texts with rankling, exasperating abusiveness in his determination to prove her customs evil and anti-Christian. Not content with such railing, the Rogerines determined to show no respect to their adversaries' opinions and worship.
They offended in another way, for, according to the colony law, they profaned the Sabbath by working, claiming that, as all days were holy, all were alike good for work. Fines and imprisonment began in 1677. They were continued in the hope, held by the authorities, that they could suppress the Rogerines by exactions which should melt away their estates.
The attitude of the Connecticut authorities at this time toward the Quakers, or Society of Friends, was quite different from that assumed toward the Baptists and Rogerines. A retrospect of their history in the colony shows them to have been the earliest dissenters, and also the ones to whom concessions, though only temporary, were first made.
In so oft-recurring a charge as that of being absent from public worship, it became lawful to exact fines unless the accused could prove before a magistrate that he had been present. But this first act did not dampen sufficiently the renewed zeal of the Rogerines, and for two years there was a continuance of sharp legislation to reduce their disorderliness.
The Rogerines, important, in their own estimate, as called of God, and angered by opposition, seized upon every scriptural passage that bade them exhort and testify, feeling it their duty to do so both in season and out.
"An Address to the Baptists, Quakers, Rogerines, and all other denominations of Christians in Connecticut, freed by law from supporting what has been called the 'Established Religion," went the rounds of the newspapers urging continued resistance to the support of any religious system that enforced a tax.
These works were published in 1757, and, five years later, called out in defense of the Establishment Eobert Ross's "Plain Address to the Quakers, Moravians, Separates, Separatist-Baptists, Rogerines, and other Enthusiasts on immediate impulses, and Revelation, &c," wherein the author considers all those whom he addresses as on a level with Frothingham, whom he names and scores for "trampling on all Churches and their Determinasions, but your own, with the greatest disdain."
This sect of Rogerines arose from the intercourse through trade of two brothers, John and James Rogers of New London, with the Sabbatarians or Seventh-day Baptists of Rhode Island. These brothers were baptized in 1674 and 1675, and their parents in the following year. All were received as members of the Seventh-day church at Newport.
In order to obtain a grasp of the situation within the colony at the time when its government concluded that the passing of the Toleration Act would be politic, it is necessary to examine the status of the dissenters there. Of these there were four classes, the Quakers or Society of Friends, the Episcopalians, the Baptists, and the Rogerines.
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