The results of the manner of the first planting on the growth of the church in Rhode Island were of a like sort. There is no room for question that the material of a true church was there, in the person of faithful and consecrated disciples of Christ, and therefore there must have been gathering together in common worship and mutual edification. But the sense of individual rights and responsibilities seems to have overshadowed the love for the whole brotherhood of disciples. The condition of the church illustrated the Separatism of Williams reduced to the absurd. There was feeble organization of Christians in knots and coteries. But sixty years passed before the building of the first house of worship in Providence, and at the end of almost a century "there had not existed in the whole colony more than eight or ten churches of any denomination, and these were mostly in a very feeble and precarious state."[107:1]
Meanwhile the inadequate compensations of a state of schism began to show themselves. In the absence of any organized fellowship of the whole there grew up, more than elsewhere, a mutual tolerance and even love among the petty sects, the lesson of which was learned where it was most needed. The churches of "the standing order" in Massachusetts not only admired but imitated "the peace and love which societies of different modes of worship entertained toward each other in Rhode Island." In 1718, not forty years from the time when Baptist churches ceased to be _religio illicita_ in Massachusetts, three foremost pastors of Boston assisted in the ordination of a minister to the Baptist church, at which Cotton Mather preached the sermon, entitled "Good Men United." It contained a frank confession of repentance for the persecutions of which the Boston churches had been guilty.[107:2]
There is a double lesson to be learned from the history of these neighbor colonies: first, that a rigorously exclusive selection of men like-minded is the best seed for the first planting of a commonwealth in the wilderness; secondly, that the exclusiveness that is justified in the infancy of such a community cannot wisely, nor even righteously, nor even possibly, be maintained in its adolescence and maturity. The church-state of Massachusetts and New Haven was overthrown at the end of the first generation by external interference. If it had continued a few years longer it must have fallen of itself; but it lasted long enough to be the mold in which the civilization of the young States should set and harden.