The covenant is the Congregational sacrament that is not a sacrament. Robert Browne's argument in 1582 was that a church comes into existence when believers agree together before God, without waiting for a magistrate or a bishop, and New England made that the constituting act of every town church. Admission required a public profession — in the strict Massachusetts practice from the 1630s, a narrative of one's own conversion delivered before the congregation, which is the ancestor of the American testimony. That requirement produced the crisis of the second generation, whose children could not testify to a conversion and therefore could not have their own children baptised; the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 was the compromise, extending baptism to the grandchildren of members while withholding communion, and it was fought over for a century.