ABSTRACT
In the early years of the settlement, the criteria governing an individual's signature to a congregational covenant were often unclear. By the 1640s, however, admission to church membership often required evidence of the experience of God's grace, transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement of divine mercy. Only such conviction by men and women of their election, the choice of them by God for salvation, would lead to similar conviction about their state of grace by fellow church members. Normally the children in families in which at least one parent was covenanted were baptised. Unless they later gave evidence of the infusion of grace, they remained in 'external' covenant and their children in turn were not eligible for baptism. By the 1660s, 'experimental' piety was in decline; the churches were therefore weakened by an insufficient influx of 'visible saints' and anxieties increased over church membership and the rights of children to baptism. In this context, the Massachusetts General Court summoned the Synod of 1662. The gathering, trying to balance doctrinal requirement, the salving of social and psychological anxiety and institutional need, resolved on the Half-Way Covenant. Baptism brought church membership so that the children of the baptised could themselves come within the covenant through baptism. Full communicant church membership, however, was still based on evidence of the experience of grace. Though initially widely accepted in New England, the Half-Way Covenant provoked some church divisions.
