Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

vard was sealed at long last. The victory was further confirmed when, a few
years later, the liberals won unshakable control of the Board of Fellows of the
corporation.
The Mathers, bitter to the last, each wrote a letter of denunciation to
Dudley, giving up Harvard as a lost cause. For his part, Leverett went on to
put the stamp of liberalism and freedom of inquiry upon Harvard, and to
help make it a vital intellectual center in the colonies. Control of Harvard—
the main center for training young ministers and laymen—meant control of
the future of the Puritan church. As Thomas Wertenbaker writes: "In short,
the control of Harvard by the liberal group meant that the future was theirs
. . . with the triumph of Leverett and the Brattles and the group they represented,
one of the chief props of the old order, the Bible Commonwealth of
Winthrop and Cotton, was . . . knocked away."*
One of the first products of the new, Leverett-trained generation of Massachusetts
intellectuals was the Reverend Benjamin Colman, one of Leverett's
favorite pupils, who graduated from Harvard in the 1690s. Colman was
selected the first minister of the new Brattle Street Church, and was largely
responsible for the church's defiant liberal manifesto. By the second decade of
the eighteenth century, The Reverend Mr. Colman had become one of Harvard's
fellows and one of its most influential members.
Defeated at every hand, the Mathers and the other Puritan reactionaries
decided to counterattack by transforming Puritan church polity into virtual
Presbyterianism. Puritanism had always been an uneasy halfway house
between Congregational and Presbyterian rule; now, seeing that individual
congregations could be captured by the liberal forces, the old guard decided
to impose collective synodal control on the individual churches. A ministerial
convention of the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts had already begun to
meet by the turn of the century. In 1705, the convention adopted the Massachusetts
Proposals, which had been adopted by the principal Boston divines
under the lead of the Mathers. The convention made the sweeping proposal
that ministerial associations, each headed by a standing council, should have
the power to examine and license ministers and assign ministers to the various
churches. The proposals were eventually adopted, with the exception of the
rule of each association by a council. The result of the change was a shift of
Massachusetts Puritanism in the direction, though not a complete adoption, of
Presbyterian ecclesiology.
Sturdy liberal resistance to this shift was headed by the redoubtable Reverend
John Wise. Defending Congregational polity, Wise published two
famous and widely read works: The Church's Quarrel Exposed (1710; 2nd
ed., 1715) and A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches
(1717). Impelled by his interest in the forms of church government, Wise
*Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (New York: Grosset &
Du¤lap, 1947), p. 15 8.
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