About 1705, the Rogerene Society came to the conclusion that the Jewish Sabbath and ordinances were, according to the teachings of the New Testament, done away with by the new dispensation, and they began to hold their meetings on Sunday as the more convenient day. See Part II, Chap. VI.
I order this to be set up in open view, in some public place, in the town of Providence, that the inhabitants may see and be sensible of what may be expected from a Presbyterian government, in case they should once get the rule over us. Their ministers are creeping in amongst us with adulatious pretense, and declare their great abhorrence to their forefather’s sanguinary proceedings with the Quakers, Baptists and others. I am unwilling to apply Prov. xxvi, 25, to any of them; but we have a specimen of what has lately been acted in a Presbyterian government, which I think may suppose it sits a queen and shall see no sorrow. I may fairly say of some of the Presbyterian rulers and Papists, as Jacob once said of his two sons, Gen. xlix, 5 and 6 verses, “They are brethren, instruments of cruelty are in their habitations! O, my soul, come not thou into their secret! Unto their assembly, mine honor, be thou not united!” Amos v, 7, “They who turn judgment into wormwood and leave off righteousness in the earth.” Chapter vi, 12, “For they have turned judgment into gall, and the fruit of righteousness into hemlock!” And I think in whomsoever the spirit of persecution restest there cannot be much of the spirit of God. And I must observe that, notwithstanding the Presbyterian pretended zeal to a strict observance of a first day Sabbath was such that those poor people might not be suffered to travel from Groton to Lebanon on that day, on a religious occasion, as hath been minded, but must be apprehended as gross malefactors and unmercifully punished; yet, when a Presbyterian minister, which hath a great fame for abilities, hath been to preach in the town of Providence, why truly then the Presbyterians have come flocking in, upon the first day of the week, to hear him, from Rehoboth, and the furthest parts of Attleborough, and from Killingly, which is much further than John Rogers and his friends were travelling; and this may pass for a Godly zeal; but the other must be punished for a sinful action. Oh! the partiality of such nominal Christians!