This secession, small in number, but weighty in character, was of course a painful shock to the hitherto unbroken unity of the church and clergy of Connecticut. But it was not quite like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. It had been immediately preceded by not a little conference and correspondence with Connecticut pastors on the one hand, and on the other hand with representatives of the powerful and wealthy Propagation Society, on the question of support to be received from England for those who should secede. Its prior antecedents reached farther back into history. The Baptist convictions of the president of Harvard in 1650 were not more clearly in line with the individualism of the Plymouth Separatists than the scruples of the rector of Yale in 1722 were in line with the Nationalism of Higginson and Winthrop. This sentiment, especially strong in Connecticut, had given rise to much study as to the best form of a colonial church constitution; and the results of this had recently been embodied (in 1708) in the mildly classical system of the Saybrook Platform. The filial love of the Puritan colonists toward the mother church of England was by no means extinct in the third generation. Alongside of the inevitable repugnance felt and manifested toward the arrogance, insolence, and violence with which the claims of the Episcopal Church were commended by royal governors and their attachés and by some of the imported missionaries, there is ample evidence of kindly and fraternal feeling, far beyond what might have been expected, on the part of the New England clergy toward the representatives of the Church of England. The first missionaries of the "Venerable Society," Keith and Talbot, arriving in New England in 1702, met with welcome from some of the ministers, who "both hospitably entertained us in their houses and requested us to preach in their congregations, which accordingly we did, and received great thanks both from the ministers and people."[133:1] One of these hospitable pastors was the Rev. Gurdon Saltonstall, of New London, who twenty years later, as governor of the colony, presided at the debate which followed upon the demission of Rector Cutler.
The immediate results of what had been expected to lead off a large defection from the colonial clergy were numerically insignificant; but very far from insignificant was the fact that in Connecticut a sincere and spontaneous movement toward the Episcopal Church had arisen among men honored and beloved, whose ecclesiastical views were not tainted with self-seeking or servility or with an unpatriotic shame for their colonial home and sympathy with its political enemies. Elsewhere in New England, and largely in Connecticut also, the Episcopal Church in its beginnings was handicapped with a dead-weight of supercilious and odious Toryism. The example of a man like Johnson showed that one might become an Episcopalian without ceasing to be a patriotic American and without holding himself aloof from the fellowship of good men. The conference in Yale College library, September 13, 1722, rather than the planting of a system of exotic missions, marks the true epoch from which to date the progress of a genuinely American Episcopal Church.[134:1]