And yet, Connecticut is recalled as a part of that New England where
those not Congregationalists, the unorthodox or radical thinkers,
found early and late an uncomfortable atmosphere and restricted
liberties. By a study of her past, I have hoped to contribute to a
fairer judgment of the men and measures of colonial times, and to a
correct estimate of those essentials in religion and morals which
endure from age to age, and which alone, it would seem, must
constitute the basis of that "ultimate union of Christendom" toward
which so many confidently look. The past should teach the present,
and one generation, from dwelling upon the transient beliefs and
opinions of a preceding, may better judge what are the non-essentials
of its own.

Connecticut's individual experiment in the union of Church and State
is separable neither from the New England setting of her earliest days
nor from the early years of that Congregationalism which the colony
approved and established. Hence, the opening chapters of her story
must treat of events both in old England and in New. And because
religious liberty was finally won by a coalition of men like-minded in
their attitude towards rights of conscience and in their desire for
certain necessary changes and reforms in government, the final
chapters must deal with social and political conditions more than with
those purely religious. It may be pertinent to remark that the passing
of a hundred years since the divorce of Church and State and the
reforms of a century ago have brought to the commonwealth some of the
same deplorable political conditions that the men of the past, the
first Constitutional Reform Party, swept away by the peaceful
revolution of 1818.