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CHAPTER FOUR

Opinions on Blasphemy

When a special court session convened in Hartford to hear evidence against an outspoken New London dissenter, Lyme’s minister joined other Connecticut clergymen to offer testimony.

The opinions of four ministers were taken as to the blasphemous nature of said expressions … [and] in every one of the expressions evidenced against him there is a high and abominable profanation of the name of Christ.

Congregational ministers responded harshly to heresy and deviance in their struggle to eradicate the influence of Satan. Like witchcraft suspicions, dissenting beliefs occasionally reverberated in Lyme, and a year after preaching the election sermon in Hartford, Moses Noyes returned in 1695 to testify at a special Superior Court session about an ongoing challenge to New London’s church.

A quarter of a century earlier, in 1670, Matthew Griswold had arranged for his eldest daughter, Elizabeth Griswold (1652–1727), to marry John Rogers (1648–1721), the eligible son of a propertied New London merchant. An encounter with a Baptist sect in Rhode Island four years later prompted the conversion of Elizabeth’s husband. His dissenting beliefs, outspoken and confrontational, caused her, with her father’s influence, to petition the General Court in 1676 for a release from her “conjugal bond to her husband.”

Before succeeding John Winthrop Jr. as Connecticut’s governor in 1708, Rev. Gurdon Saltonstall, shown here in a portrait by an unknown artist, served for two decades as New London’s minister.

Even before that request was granted, the Court allowed Elizabeth to live with her father in Lyme because she was “under so great distress and hazard.” The Court also took the unusual step of permitting her two children to join her, having judged that John Rogers, who had “utterly renounce[d] all the visible worship of New England, and professedly declare[d] against the Christian Sabbath as a mere invention,” was “so heterodox in his opinion and practice.”

The language and behavior of Elizabeth’s estranged husband grew increasingly defiant. Supported by family members and a small group of dissenters who became known as Rogerenes, he advocated direct confrontation with the established church. To compel his submission to established authority, the Court ordered him fined, whipped, placed in the stocks, and held in irons in the depths of winter in New London’s unheated jail. Still he refused to moderate his speech, observe the Sabbath, or refrain from promoting baptism by full immersion.

Court hearings had already spanned two decades when Moses Noyes joined Rev. Gurdon Saltonstall (1666–1724), Simon Bradstreet’s successor in New London, and two other clergymen to offer their opinion on the “blasphemous nature” of John Rogers’s expressions. The previous year he had driven a wheelbarrow into New London’s church to protest observance of the Sabbath, and the ministers testified that statements from the accused evidenced “a high and abominable profanation of the name of Christ.” Rogers was found guilty of evil speaking against the ordinances of God and sentenced to pay a fine, remain in prison until he pledged “non-disturbance of the people of God,” and stand with a rope around his neck on a ladder leaning against the gallows for a quarter of an hour.

Ministers in Massachusetts had resorted to even harsher means to safeguard the established church. “The devil is now making one more attempt upon us,” Rev. Cotton Mather (1663–1728) wrote in August 1692 after the last of a series of witchcraft executions in Salem. Witchcraft, he declared, “if it were not seasonably discovered would probably blow up, and pull down all the churches in the country.” The struggle against witchcraft involved Moses Noyes’s family members, Harvard schoolmates, and childhood friends. Not only his brother-in-law Rev. John Hale (1636–1700), the long-serving minister in Beverly, but also his cousin Rev. Nicholas Noyes, ordained in Salem after preaching in Lyme’s neighboring parish, witnessed the August executions and lent their authority to the court proceedings. Samuel Sewall, a wealthy Boston merchant who had recently kept the Sabbath in Stonington with Rev. James Noyes, served as one of the nine sentencing judges. He recorded in his diary the names of the “five unfortunates [who] were executed at Salem for witchcraft” and also noted the “very great number of spectators” present: “Mr. Cotton Mather was there, Mr. Sims, Hale, Noyes, Chiever, &c.” The accused, Judge Sewall added, all “said they were innocent,” but “Mr. Mather says they all died by a righteous sentence.”

In a treatise on witchcraft, Rev. Cotton Mather denounced Satan’s assault on New England’s churches and approved the execution of witches, but suggested caution in the use of “spectral evidence.”

Moses Noyes’s sister Sarah Noyes (1656–1695) had married his Harvard schoolmate John Hale in 1684 and was pregnant with their fourth child when she faced witchcraft accusations in November 1692. By then doubts about the reliability of spectral evidence had ended the witchcraft trials, and Mrs. Hale was never formally charged, but when she died three years later at age thirty-nine, her demise was said to be “hastened by the excitement through which she had passed.” After his wife’s death, Rev. Hale wrote A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft to reexamine the assumptions and acknowledge the mistakes of Salem’s witchcraft persecutions. A few months later Judge Sewall made a public apology for his actions in a petition read on a fast day. Stating that he “desire[d] to take the blame and shame of it,” he asked “the pardon of men and especially desire[d] prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin.”

Lyme’s minister had not yet been called to office when witchcraft suspicions gripped Massachusetts Bay parishes. But in May 1695 when his sister died in Beverly, Rev. Moses Noyes traveled to Hartford to defend the established church against a different threat by condemning John Rogers’s blasphemy.

When Rev. Moses Noyes’s brother-in-law Rev. John Hale reconsidered Salem’s witchcraft persecutions, he urged readers that “it is our duty, in all humility, and with fear and trembling to search after truth.” Courtesy of Historic Beverly.