his arms had made the conquest of Jamaica, he offered them the island, and they never forfeited his regard. 1655. The American colonies remember the years of his

power as the period when British sovereignty was for them free from rapacity, intolerance, and oppression. He may be called the benefactor of the English in America; for in his time they enjoyed unshackled the benevolence of Providence, freedom of industry, of commerce, of religion, and of government.

Yet the Puritans of New England perceived that their security rested on the personal character of the protector, and that other revolutions were ripening; they, therefore, never allowed their vigilance to be lulled. With the influence of the elders, the spirit of independence was confirmed; but the evils ensued that are in some measure inseparable from a religious establishment; a distinct interest grew up under the system; the severity of the laws was sharpened against infidelity on the one hand, and sectarianism on the other; nor can it be denied, nor should it be concealed, that the elders, especially Wilson and Norton, instigated and sustained the government in its worst cruelties.

Where the mind is left free, religion can never have dangerous enemies, for no class has then a motive to attempt its subversion; while the interests of society demand a foundation for the principles of justice and benevolence. Atheism is a folly of the metaphysician, not the folly of human nature. Of savage life, Roger Williams declared that he had never found one native American who denied the existence of a God; in civilized life, when it was said of the court of Frederic, that the place of king's atheist was vacant, the gibe was felt as the most biting sarcasm. Infidelity gains the victory, when it wrestles with hypocrisy or with superstition, but never when its antagonist is reason. Men revolt against the oppressions of superstition, the exactions of ecclesiastical tyranny, but never against religion itself. When an ecclesiastical establishment, under the heaviest penalties, requires universal conformity, some consciences are oppressed and wronged. If the wrong is

excessive, intellectual servitude is followed by consequences analogous to those which ensue on the civil slavery of the people; the mind, as it bursts its fetters, is clouded by a sense of injury; the judgment is confused; and, in the zeal to resist a tyranny, passion attempts to sweep away every form of religion. Bigotry commits the correlative error, when it endeavors to control opinion by positive statutes, to substitute the terrors of law for convincing argument. It is a crime to resist truth under pretence of resisting injurious power; it is equally a crime to enslave the human understanding, under pretence of protecting religion. The reckless mind, rashly hurrying to the warfare against superstition, has often, though by mistake, attacked intelligence itself; but religion, of itself alone, never had an enemy, except indeed as there have been theorists, whose harmless ingenuity has denied all distinction between right and wrong, between justice and its opposite. Positive enactments against irreligion, like positive enactments against fanaticism, provoke the evil which they were designed to prevent. Danger is inviting. If left to himself, he that vilifies the foundations of morals and happiness does but publish his own unworthiness. A public prosecution is a mantle to cover his shame; for to suffer for opinion's sake is courageous; and courage is always an honorable quality.

The conscientious austerity of the colonists, invigorated by the love of power, led to a course of legislation, which, if it was followed by the melancholy result of bloodshed, was also followed, among the freemen of the New World, by emancipation from bigotry, achieved without any of the excesses of intolerant infidelity. The inefficiency of fanatic laws was made plain by the resistance of a still more stubborn fanaticism.

Saltonstall wrote from Europe that, but for their severities, the people of Massachusetts would have been "the eyes of God's people in England." The consistent Sir Henry Vane had urged that "the oppugners of the Congregational way should not, from its own principles and practice, be taught to root it out." "It

1651.

were better," he added, "not to censure any persons for matters of a religious concernment." The elder Winthrop had, I believe, relented before his death, and professed himself weary of banishing heretics; the soul of the younger Winthrop was incapable of harboring a thought of intolerant cruelty; but the rugged Dudley was not mellowed by old age. "God forbid," said he, "our love for the truth should be grown so cold that we should tolerate errors. I die no libertine." "Better tolerate hypocrites and tares than thorns and briers," affirmed Cotton. "Polypiety," echoed Ward, "is the greatest impiety in the world. To say that men ought to have liberty of conscience is impious ignorance." "Religion," said the melancholic Norton, "admits of no eccentric motions." But the people did not entirely respond to these extravagances, into which the bigotry of personal interest betrayed the elders; and the love of unity, so favorable to independence, betrayed the leading men. The topic of the power of the civil magistrate in religious affairs was become the theme of perpetual discussion; and it needed all the force of established authority to sustain the doctrine of persecution. Massachusetts was already in the state of transition, and it was just before expiring that bigotry, with convulsive energy, exhibited its worst aspect; just as the waves of the sea are most tumultuous when the wind is subsiding and the tempest is yielding to a calm.

Anabaptism was to the establishment a dangerous rival. When Clarke, the pure and tolerant Baptist of Rhode Island, one of the happy few who have connected their name with the liberty and happiness of a commonwealth,

July 20.

began to preach to a small audience in Lynn, he was 1651. seized by the civil officers. Being compelled to attend public worship with the congregation of the town, he expressed his aversion by a harmless indecorum, which would have been without excuse, had his presence been voluntary. He and his companions were tried, and condemned to pay a fine of twenty or thirty pounds; and Holmes, who refused to pay his fine, was whipped unmercifully.

Since a particular form of worship had become a part of the civil establishment, irreligion was now to be punished as a civil offence. The state was a model of Christ's kingdom on earth; treason against the civil government was treason against Christ; and reciprocally, as the gospel had the right paramount, blasphemy, or what a jury should call blasphemy, was the highest offence in the catalogue of crimes. To deny any book of the Old or New Testament to be the written and infallible word of God was punishable by fine or by stripes, and, in case of obstinacy, by exile or death. Absence from "the ministry of the word" was punished by a fine.

By degrees the spirit of the establishment began 1653. to subvert the fundamental principles of Independency. The liberty of prophesying was refused, except the approbation of four elders, or of a county court, had been obtained. Remonstrance was useless. The union of church and state was fast corrupting both: it mingled base ambition with the former; it gave a false direction to the legislation of the latter. And in 1658 the 1658. general court claimed for itself, for the council, and for any two organic churches, the right of silencing any person who was not as yet ordained. The creation of a national, uncompromising church led the Congregationalists of Massachusetts to the indulgence of the passions which had disgraced their English persecutors; and Laud was justified by the men whom he had wronged.

But if the Baptists were feared, as professing doctrines tending to disorganize society, how much more reason was there to dread such emissaries of the Quakers as appeared in Massachusetts! The early Quakers in New England displayed little of the mild philosophy, the statesman-like benevolence, of Penn; though they possessed the virtue of passive resistance in perfection. Left to themselves, they appeared like a motley tribe of persons, half fanatic, half insane; without consideration, and without definite purposes. Persecution called them forth to show what intensity of will can dwell in the depths of the human heart. They were like those weeds which are unsightly to the

eye, and which only when trampled give out precious perfumes.

1656. July.

The rise of "the people called Quakers" was one of the most remarkable results of the Protestant revolution. It was a consequence of the aspiration of the human mind for a perfect emancipation, after the long reign of bigotry and superstition. It grew up with men who were impatient at the slow progress of the Reformation, the tardy advances of intellectual liberty. A better opportunity will offer for explaining its influence on American institutions. It was in the month of July, 1656, that two of its members, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, arrived in the road before Boston. There was as yet no statute respecting Quakers; but, on the general law against heresy, their trunks were searched, and their books burnt by the hangman; "though no token could be found on them but of innocence," their persons were examined in search of signs of witchcraft; and, after five weeks' close imprisonment, they were thrust out of the jurisdiction. Eight others were, during the year, sent back to England. The rebuke enlarged the ambition of Mary Fisher; she repaired alone to Adrianople, and delivered a message to the Grand Sultan. The Turks thought her crazed, and she passed through their army "without hurt or scoff."

1657.

Yet the next year, although a special law now prohibited the introduction of Quakers, Mary Dyar, an Antinomian exile, and Ann Burden, came into the colony; the former was claimed by her husband, and taken to Rhode Island; the latter was sent to England. A woman who had come all the way from London, to warn the magistrates against persecution, was whipped with twenty stripes. Some, who had been banished, came a second time; they were imprisoned, whipped, and once more sent away, under penalty of further punishment, if they returned again. A fine was imposed on such as should entertain any "of the accursed sect;" and a Quaker, after the first conviction, was to lose one ear, after the second another, after the third to have the tongue bored with a red-hot iron. It was but for a very short time that the