The Congregational Churches

Browne's Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie, printed at Middelburg in 1582, denies that the magistrates may “compell religion, to plant churches by power.”

It closes the point, “Let vs not therfore tarie for the Magistrates.”

In his Booke of the same year Browne defines Christians as believers joined by a willing covenant with God, and makes every member a king, a priest and a prophet under Christ.

William Bradford, one of the Scrooby company, wrote that the Scrooby people “joyned them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate.”

Walker notes that Bradford wrote at least a quarter of a century later.

The synod of the New England churches met in 1646 and 1647 and opened its final session at Cambridge on 15 August 1648. Its preface dates the vote to the last of the sixth month, 1648.

The Platform calls the church covenant the form of a church: “This Form is the Visible Covenant, Agreement, or consent” by which the members give themselves to the Lord.

For doctrine the synod accepted the Westminster Assembly's confession, “for the substance therof,” as Walker quotes it. The Platform was printed at Cambridge in 1649.

In England the elders and messengers of about a hundred and twenty churches met at the Savoy in London from 29 September to 12 October 1658. Increase Mather gave the number of churches in 1700.

Their Declaration added a platform of church polity, vesting all power over the church in Christ as King and Head. Walker writes that American Congregationalists never adopted that platform of polity, holding to the Cambridge Platform.

Walker writes that part of a Separatist church met from 1605 or 1606 at the house of William Brewster, the postmaster at Scrooby, later their elder. They reached Amsterdam in 1607 and 1608 and moved to Leyden in 1609.

Bradford tells of “a combination made by them before they came ashore,” because some strangers aboard said none had power to command them under a patent for Virginia.

The signers bound themselves to “covenant & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation.”

Bradford dates it at Cape Cod, 11 November 1620.

Walker calls the Compact “in no sense a creed or a religious covenant,” and yet “the direct fruit of the teachings of Congregationalism.”

The original is not known to survive, and the text rests on three early copies.

Sixty-six years after Browne's Treatise, chapter XVII, section 8, of the Cambridge Platform named idolatry, blasphemy and heresy among the offences that “are to be restrayned, & punished by civil authority.”

Section 9 adds that if a church grows schismatic, “the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive powr, as the matter shall require.”

The Salem church renewed its covenant in 1660 and bound its members to beware the doctrine of the Quakers, citing Matthew 16.

Walker wrote in 1893 as a historian from inside the tradition. Of the Platform he says, “It urges the right of the civil magistrate to interfere in matters of doctrine and practice, because Congregationalism then believed that such rights were his.”

Browne himself made his peace with the Church of England in 1586 and held the parish of Achurch from 1591 until his death, Walker records.