Supports the thesis "that the New England Way was first formulated in England, and first tested in the Netherlands...." Refutes the contention presented by Edmund S. Morgan, 'Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea' (New York: New York U. Press, 1963) and Geoffrey Nuttall, 'Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1660' (Oxford, 1957), that the New England way, "conceived as a state religion, first took root in New England...by a sudden mutation of the Separatist strain in Puritan thought." Stearns and Brawner contend that public statement by a candidate for admission to the church of his spiritual experience "was not an innovation embodying a new standard of purity, but a technical adaptation of the old standard" to the new problem facing the "Saints" in New England - a crowd of strangers seeking church membership which now opened the way to political privilege and social prestige instead of to persecution and martyrdom as in the Old World.