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The Methodist Episcopal Church has also its representative here, and all of these evangelizing agencies are supplemented by the work of the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., and the Salvation Army. Yet it is not too much to say that the Baptists have first place in Burma, both in church-membership and in education.
Till 1645 the deputies voted with the magistrates, but in that year the general court was divided into two branches as in Massachusetts. In one particular the constitution was more liberal than the unwritten constitution of Massachusetts: church-membership was not required as a condition of the suffrage, and yet in the administration of the government the theocracy was all-powerful.
Grant Thorburn was suspended from church-membership for shaking hands with him. To the boys he was an object of curious attention; his nose was the burden of their songs. Cheetham carried round a subscription-list for a public dinner. Sixty or seventy of Paine's admirers attended. It went off brilliantly, and was duly reported in the "American Citizen."
But henceforth no qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification, was to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the crown instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by the legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval.
I, who indeed prize and reverence this sacred library, as of all outward means and conservatives of Christian faith and practice the surest and the most reflective of the inward Word; I, who hold that the Bible contains the religion of Christians, but who dare not say that whatever is contained in the Bible is the Christian religion, and who shrink from all question respecting the comparative worth and efficacy of the written Word as weighed against the preaching of the Gospel, the discipline of the Churches, the continued succession of the Ministry, and the communion of Saints, lest by comparing them I should seem to detach them; I tremble at the processes which the Grotian divines without scruple carry on in their treatment of the sacred writers, as soon as any texts declaring the peculiar tenets of our Faith are cited against them even tenets and mysteries which the believer at his baptism receives as the title-writ and bosom-roll of his adoption; and which, according to my scheme, every Christian born in Church-membership ought to bring with him to the study of the sacred Scriptures as the master-key of interpretation.
The state they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church-membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid. Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest fanaticism.
Ruth Erskine who honestly thought herself on the high road to heaven because she had decided to offer herself for church-membership as soon as she returned from Saratoga did not find the comfort and rest of heart that so heroic a resolution ought to have brought. It was in vain that she endeavored to dismiss the subject and try to decide just what new costume the Saratoga trip would demand.
The relation of the individual to the local church, then, did not in any sense supersede his personal relations to Christ, but simply strengthened and further expressed this higher relationship. In this standard of church-membership is found the secret of the union in one body of all apostolic Christians.
The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or hold office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually identified.
The governments of Massachusetts and New Haven "never absolutely merged church and state." The franchise depended on church-membership, but the voter, exercising his right in directing the affairs of the colony, was speaking, "not as the church but as the civil Court of Legislation and adjudication." W. Walker, History of the Congregational Churches, p. 123.
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