Zechariah Symmes

rdf:langString Zechariah Symmes

rdf:langString Zechariah Symmes (5 April 1599, in Canterbury – 4 February 1671, in Charlestown, Massachusetts) was an English Puritan clergyman who emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England and became pastor of the First Church in Charlestown, an office he held continuously from 1634 to his death in 1671. Although not one of the original Charlestown founders of 1629, on arrival in 1634 he swiftly found his place among them in the church they had convened two years previously. One of the many emigrant ministers who emerged from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was a close fellow-worker among the leading lights of the "Bible Commonwealth". Having helped to formulate the laws by which the civil and ecclesiastical polity of the Colony were interwoven, throughout his long ministry he strongly upheld the conservative Puritan orthodoxy of his own Church, and of the Congregational collective, against doctrinal threat or dissent. Even in his passage to America he was confronted with the Antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson, and having urged and participated in the proceedings against her party which led to their banishment, he played an active part in the many unfolding controversies against the Baptists, the Quakers, and other subversive tendencies. With Massachusetts Baptists in particular he had a long struggle as their leading protagonists during the 1640s and 1650s were members of his own church. He is the ancestor of one of the early English families in America.