2. Presbyterian Connecticut

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Connecticut, mirabile dictu, replaced Massachusetts Bay as the fountainhead of Calvinist orthodoxy in America. While the Massachusetts church was prevented by determined opposition from budging much beyond its halfway position between Congregational and Presbyterian polities, Connecticut Puritanism eagerly went all the way toward a Presbyterian position. By adopting the Saybrook Platform in 1708, the Puritans of Connecticut became virtually Presbyterian in church government; Connecticut now had an established Presbyterian church. Not only that: the orthodox Calvinists of Connecticut, seeing Harvard go the way of liberalism, determined to establish another college, to reestablish a fountainhead of rigid Calvinism for New England. Accordingly, Yale was founded in 1701, receiving its permanent location at New Haven in 1716.* The governing body of the college consisted completely of ministers who, it was ruled, must be free of all deviations, whether to the ecclesiastical right or left.

Even the Connecticut establishment, however, found that it had to relax its full rigor. As in Massachusetts, it was compelled, after a while, to exempt members of various religious sects from having to pay taxes to support the Presbyterian establishment. In 1727, the Connecticut General Court passed a law exempting any Anglicans from payment, and two years later this immunity was extended to Quakers and Baptists.

*Its original name was Collegiate School of Connecticut, becoming Yale College in 1718.