Just about this time, however, there came a break in the uniformity of Puritan rule.  The crown and church in England had long looked upon it with disfavor, and in 1684 King Charles II annulled the old charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company.  A new document issued seven years later wrested from the Puritans of the colony the right to elect their own governor and reserved the power of appointment to the king.  It also abolished the rule limiting the suffrage to church members, substituting for it a simple property qualification.  Thus a royal governor and an official family, certain to be Episcopalian in faith and monarchist in sympathies, were forced upon Massachusetts; and members of all religious denominations, if they had the required amount of property, were permitted to take part in elections.  By this act in the name of the crown, the Puritan monopoly was broken down in Massachusetts, and that province was brought into line with Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, where property, not religious faith, was the test for the suffrage.

=Growth of Religious Toleration.=—­Though neither the Anglicans of Virginia nor the Puritans of Massachusetts believed in toleration for other denominations, that principle was strictly applied in Rhode Island.  There, under the leadership of Roger Williams, liberty in matters of conscience was established in the beginning.  Maryland, by granting in 1649 freedom to those who professed to believe in Jesus Christ, opened its gates to all Christians; and Pennsylvania, true to the tenets of the Friends, gave freedom of conscience to those “who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and Eternal God to be the creator, upholder, and ruler of the World.”  By one circumstance or another, the Middle colonies were thus early characterized by diversity rather than uniformity of opinion.  Dutch Protestants, Huguenots, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, New Lights, Moravians, Lutherans, Catholics, and other denominations became too strongly intrenched and too widely scattered to permit any one of them to rule, if it had desired to do so.  There were communities and indeed whole sections where one or another church prevailed, but in no colony was a legislature steadily controlled by a single group.  Toleration encouraged diversity, and diversity, in turn, worked for greater toleration.

The government and faith of the dissenting denominations conspired with economic and political tendencies to draw America away from the English state.  Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and Puritans had no hierarchy of bishops and archbishops to bind them to the seat of power in London.  Neither did they look to that metropolis for guidance in interpreting articles of faith.  Local self-government in matters ecclesiastical helped to train them for local self-government in matters political.  The spirit of independence which led Dissenters to revolt in the Old World, nourished as it was amid favorable circumstances in the New World, made them all the more zealous in the defense of every right against authority imposed from without.