An arrangement whereby all persons of upright and decorous lives were considered as church members, and so entitled to the exercise of political privileges. The advocates of the movement, which was bitterly opposed, organized themselves as a new society in Boston, in the year 1669.
1769. “The Halfway Covenant. A Dialogue. By Joseph Bellamy, D.D.,” a tract against the Halfway Covenant, was sold in Boston by Kneeland and Adams, price six coppers.—Mass. Gazette, March 9.
1856. The giving out of the tokens, and the Halfway Covenant, though now dispensed with, were both continued into Dr. Dana’s ministry (1822 to 1826).—Lawrence’s ‘New Hampshire Churches,’ p. 94: see Notes and Queries, 10 S. viii. 5.
