... Our
General Court is now sitting. I have hinted to some of the members, that
it will be proper for them to express their fears of the setting up an
hierarchy here. I am well assured a motion will be made to this
purpose.... I may be mistaken, but I am persuaded the dispute between
Great Britain and her colonies will never be _amicably_ settled.... I
sent you a few hasty remarks on the A-b-p's sermon. ... I am more and more
convinced of the meanness, art--if he was not in so high a station, I
should say, falsehood--of that Arch-Pr-l-te." [Footnote: Thomas Seeker.
Andrew Eliot to Thomas Hollis, Jan. 5, 1768. _Mass. Hist. Coll._
fourth series, iv. 422.] An established priesthood is naturally the
firmest support of despotism; but the course of events made that of
Massachusetts revolutionary. This was a social factor whose importance it
is hard to overestimate; for though the influence of the elders had much
declined during the eighteenth century, their political power was still
immense; and it is impossible to measure the degree in which the drift of
feeling toward independence would have been arrested had they been
thoroughly loyal. At all events, the evidence tends to show that it is
most improbable the first blood would have been shed in the streets of
Boston had it been the policy of Great Britain to conciliate the
Congregational Church; if, for example, the liberals had been forced to
meet the issue of taxation upon a statute designed to raise a revenue for
the maintenance of the evangelical clergy.
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