The Puritans in New England, however, inherited the older socialism to so
large an extent that they proceeded to establish what was a state church in
method, if not in theory. Though they began with the idea that the churches
were to be supported by voluntary contributions (and always continued that
method in Boston), yet in a few years they resorted to taxation for their
maintenance, and enacted stringent laws compelling attendance upon them by
every resident of a town, whatever his beliefs or his personal interests.
They forbade the utterance of opinions not approved by the authorities, and
made use of fines, imprisonment, and death in support of arbitrary laws
enacted for this purpose. These methods were the same as those used by the
older socialistic and state churches to compel acceptance of their
teachings and practices. They were based on the idea of the corporate
nature of the church, and its right to control the individual in the name
of the social whole.

The harshness of the Puritan methods was the result of this attempt to
maintain a new idea in harmony with an old practice. The Baptists were
consistently individualists in rejecting infant baptism, accepting
conversion as essential to church membership, maintaining freedom of
conscience, and practising toleration as a fundamental social law. The
Puritans inconsistently combined conversion and infant baptism,--the
Protestant right of private judgment with the Catholic methods of the state
church,--a democratic theory of popular suffrage with a most aristocratic
limitation of that suffrage to church members. As late as 1674 only 2,527
men in all had been admitted to the exercise of the franchise in
Massachusetts. One-sixth or one-eighth of the men were voters, the rest
were disfranchised. The church and the state were controlled by this small
minority in a community that was theoretically democratic, both in religion
and politics.