estantism appealed to liberty; then closed the doors against her. On a stock of freedom she grafted a scion of despotism." Surely this is the old misstatement often made, often refuted. When were those colonists unfaithful to their own principle? When did they appeal to liberty? They appealed to truth. It would have been far better and nobler had they aimed at both, but in this imperfect world we have often to praise and venerate men for a single virtue. Anything but the largest toleration would have been inconsistency in Roger Williams, or perhaps-for this is less clearly established-in Lord Baltimore; but in order to show that the Puritans were false to religious liberty it must be shown that they had proclaimed it. On the contrary, what they sought to proclaim was religious truth. They lost the expansive influence of freedom, but they gained the propelling force of a high though gloomy faith. They lost the variety that exists in a liberal community where each man has his own opinion, but they gained the concentrated power of a homogeneous and well-ordered people.

was compelled to indict him as a nuisance in the same year, on this count, among others, "that Samuel Gorton contumeliously reproached the magistrates, calling them Just-asses." Nevertheless, all these, and such as these, were at last disarmed and made harmless by the wise policy of Rhode Island, guided by Roger Williams, after he had outgrown the superfluous antagonisms of his youth, and learned to be conciliatory in action as well as comprehensive in doctrine. Yet even he had so much to undergo in keeping the peace. with all these heterogeneous materials that he recoiled at last from "such an infinite liberty of conscience," and declared that in the case of Quakers "a due and moderate restraint and punishment of these incivilities" was not only no persecution, but was "a duty and command of God."

Maryland has shared with Rhode Island the honor of having established religious freedom, and this claim is largely based upon the noble decree passed by its General Assembly in 1649:

"No person whatsoever in this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be any way troubled or molested for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof, or any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his or her consent."

But it is never hard to evade a statute that seems to secure religious liberty, and this decree did not prevent the Maryland colony from afterward enacting that if any

There are but two of the early colonies of which the claim can be seriously made that they were founded on any principle of religious freedom. These two are Rhode Island and Maryland. It was said of the first by Roger Williams, its spiritual founder, that "a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian conscience" should be there granted "to all men of all nations and countries." Accordingly, the colony spread such shel-person should deny the Holy Trinity he ter on a very wide scale. It received Anne Hutchinson after she had set the state as well as church in a turmoil at Boston, and had made popular elections turn on her opinions. It not only sheltered but gave birth to Jemima Wilkinson, prophetess of the "Cumberland Zealots," who might under the stimulus of a less tolerant community have expanded into a Joanna Southcote or a Mother Ann Lee. It protected Samuel Gorton, a man of the Savonarola temperament, of whom his last surviving disciple said, in 1771, "My master wrote in heaven, and none can understand his writings but those who live in heaven while on earth." It cost such an effort to assimilate these exciting ingredients that Roger Williams described Gorton in 1640 as "bewitching and bemadding poor Providence," and the Grand Jury of that city

should first be bored through the tongue and fined or imprisoned; then, for the second offense, should be branded as a blasphemer, the letter "B" being stamped on his forehead; and for the third offense should die. This was certainly a very limited toleration; and granting that it has a partial value, it remains an interesting question who secured it. Cardinal Manning and others have claimed this measure of toleration as due to the Roman Catholics, but Mr. E. D. Neill has conclusively shown that the Roman Catholic element was originally much smaller than was supposed, that the "two hundred Catholic gentlemen" usually claimed as founding the colony were really some twenty gentlemen and three hundred laboring-men; that of the latter twelve died on shipboard, of whom only two confessed to the priests, thus giving a clew to the proba

results which are apparent to this day. | Dexter has shown that no less than sixty There is nothing more extraordinary in such men joined the Massachusetts Bay the Massachusetts and Connecticut colo- colony within ten years of its origin, nies than the promptness with which they while after seventeen years of separate exentered on the work of popular education. istence the Virginia colony held but two These little communities, just struggling university men, Rev. Hant Wyatt and for existence, marked out an educational | Dr. Pott; and Rhode Island had also but system which had then no parallel in two in its early days, Roger Williams the European world. In the Massachu- and the recluse William Blaxton. No setts Bay colony, Salem had a free school one has more fully recognized the "heavy in 1640, Boston in 1642, or earlier, Cam- price paid" for this "great cup of liberty" bridge about the same time, and the state, in Rhode Island than her ablest scholar, in 1647, marked out an elaborate system Professor Diman, who employs precisely of common and grammar schools for ev- these phrases to describe it in his Bristol ery township-a system then without a address; and who fearlessly points out precedent, so far as I know, in Europe. how much that state lost, even while she Thus run the essential sentences of this gained something, by the absence of that noble document, held up to the admira- rigorous sway and that lofty public standtion of all England by Lord Macaulay in ard which were associated with the stern Parliament: rule of the Puritan clergy.

In all the early colonies, unless we ex.... "Yt learning may not be buried in y cept Rhode Island, the Puritan spirit grave of or faths in ye church and comon made itself distinctly felt, and religious wealth, the Lord assisting or endeavors-It Even in is therefore ord'ed, yt evry township in this persecution widely prevailed. iurisdiction, aft' ye Lord heth increased ym to Maryland, as has been shown, the laws ye number of 50 household", shall then forth-imposed branding and boring through the wth appoint one wthin their towne to teach all tongue as a penalty for certain opinions. such children as shall resort to him to write In Virginia those who refused to attend and reade; * and it is furth' ordered, y' the Established Church must pay 200 where any towne shall increase to ye numb of pounds of tobacco for the first offense, 500 100 families or househould', they shall set up for the second, and incur banishment for a gramer schoole, ye mr thereof being able to instruct youth so farr as they may be fited for ye university."

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The printing-press came with these schools, or before them, and was actively employed, and it is impossible not to recognize the contrast between such institutions and the spirit of that Governor of Virginia (Berkeley) who said, a quarter of a century later, "We have no free schools nor printing, and I hope shall not have these hundred years." In Maryland, convicts and indented servants were sometimes advertised for sale as teachers at an early day, and there was no public system until 1728. In Rhode Island, Newport had a public school in 1640, but it apparently lasted but a year or two, nor was there a general system till the year 1800. These contrasts are mentioned for one sole purpose: to show that no single community unites all virtues, and that it was at that period very hard for religious liberality and a good school system to exist together.

the third. A fine of 5000 pounds of tobacco was placed upon unauthorized religious meetings. Quakers and Baptists were whipped or pilloried, and any ship-master conveying Nonconformists was fined. Even so late as 1741, after persecution had virtually ceased in New England, severe laws were passed against Presbyterians in Virginia; and the above-named laws of Maryland were re-enacted in 1723. At an earlier period, however, the New England laws, if not severer, were no doubt more rigorously executed. In some cases, to be sure, the so-called laws were a deliberate fabrication, as in the case of the Connecticut "Blue Laws," a code reprinted to this day in the newspapers, but which existed only in the active and malicious imagination of the Tory Dr. Peters.

The spirit of persecution was strongest in the New England colonies, and chiefly in Massachusetts, because of the greater intensity with which men there followed out their convictions. It was less manifest in the banishment of Roger Williams There was a similar disproportion-which was, after all, not so much a reliamong the colonies in the number of uni- gious as a political transaction-than in versity - trained men. Professor F. B. the Quaker persecutions which took place

between 1656 and 1660.

must be remembered, were never persecutions in the sense which had become familiar in Europe—that is, of forbidding heretics to leave the realm, and then tormenting them if they staid. Not a Quaker ever suffered except for voluntary action; that is, for choosing to stay, or return after banishment. To demand that they should consent to be banished seems to us so unreasonable as to be an outrage; but it seemed quite otherwise, we must remember, to those who had already banished themselves to secure a spot where they could worship in their own way. Cotton Mather says, with some force:

Even these, it and ultimately in the revocation of their charter. I differ with the greatest unwillingness from my old friend Mr. John G. Whittier in his explanation of a part of these excesses. He thinks that these naked exhibitions came chiefly from those who were maddened by seeing the partial exposures of Quakers whipped through the streets. This view seems to me to overlook the highly wrought condition of mind among these enthusiasts, and the fact that they regarded everything as a symbol. When, on February 13, 1658, Sarah Gibbins and Dorothy Waugh broke two empty bottles over Rev. John Norton as "a sign of his emptiness," they deemed it right to symbolic act; and in just the same spirit sacrifice all propriety for the sake of a we find the Quaker writers of that period defending these personal exposures, not by Mr. Whittier's reasons, but as a figurative act. In Southey's CommonplaceBook there is a long extract, to precisely this effect, from the life of Thomas Story, an English Friend who had travelled in America. He seems to have been a moderate man, and to have condemned some of the extravagances of the Ranters, but gravely argues that the Quakers might really have been commanded by God to exhibit this nakedness as a sign."

"It was also thought that the very Quakers themselves would say that if they had got into a Corner of the World, and with an immense Toyl and Charge made a Wilderness habitable, on purpose there to be undisturbed in the Exercises of their Worship, they would never bear to have New-Englanders come among them and interrupt their Publick Worship, endeavor to seduce their Children from it, yea, and repeat such Endeavors after mild Entreaties first, and then just Banishments, to oblige their departure.”

We now see that this place they occupied was not a mere corner of the world, and that it was even then an essential part of the British dominions, and subject to British laws. We can therefore see that this was not the whole of the argument, but as an argumentum ad hominem it was very strong. Had the Quakers, like the Moravians, made settlements and cleared the forests for themselves, this argument would have been quite disarmed; and had those settlements been interfered with by the Puritans, the injustice would have been far more glaring; nor is it probable that the Puritans would have molested such settlements-unless they happened to be too near.

It must be remembered, too, that the Puritans did not view Quakers and other zealots as heretics merely, but as dangerous social outlaws. There was among the colonists a genuine and natural fear that if the tide of extravagant fanaticism once set in, it might culminate in such atrocities as had shocked all Europe while the Anabaptists, under John of Leyden were in power at Münster. In the frenzies and naked exhibitions of the Quakers, or rather Ranters, they saw tendencies which might end in uprooting all the social order for which they were striving,

But whatever provocation the Friends may have given, their persecution is the darkest blot upon the history of the time

It

darker than witchcraft, which was a disease of supernatural terror. And like the belief in witchcraft, the spirit of persecution could only be palliated by the general delusion of the age, by the cruelty of the English legislation against the Jesuits, which the Puritan Legislature closely followed as regarded Quakers; and in general by the attempt to unite church and state, and to take the Old Testament for a literal modern statute - book. must be remembered that our horror at this intolerance is also stimulated from time to time by certain extravagant fabrications which still appear as genuine in the newspapers; as that imaginary letter said to have been addressed by Cotton Mather to a Salem clergyman in 1682, and proposing that a colony of Quakers be arrested and sold as slaves. This absurd forgery appeared first in some Pennsylvania newspaper, accompanied by the assertion that this letter was in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. No such paper was ever known to that