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and free toleration of religion to all men, without exception against Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Familist, or any other." This was terrible to Winslow. He wrote to Winthrop, "You would have admired to have seen how sweet this carrion relished to the palate of most of them." Delay defeated the measure, and the battle moved back to Massachusetts.

The ministers, in the mean time, stood firm against all encroachments of liberty from the mother-country. The people trusted them. "It had been as unnatural for a right New-England man to live without an able ministry, as for a smith to work his iron without a fire." "The union between the elders and the State could not, therefore, but become more intimate than ever; and religion was venerated and cherished as the security against political subserviency."

It was now 1651; and Puritan intolerance, severely pressed by the advancing liberties of the age, became convulsive in its struggles to maintain its position. Saltonstall deplored these severities. If they had been liberal, they might have been "the eyes of God's people in England." Sir Henry Vane had wisely suggested that "the oppugners of the congregational way should not, from its own principles and practice, be taught to root it out."

But Dudley said, "God forbid our love for the truth should be grown so cold, that we should tolerate errors! I die no libertine." Cotton was inflexible. "Better tolerate hypocrites and tares than thorns and briers." Ward responded, Polypiety is the greatest impiety in the world. To say that men ought to have liberty of conscience is impious ignorance." "Religion," said Norton," admits of no eccentric notions."

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In 1649, the people of Massachusetts resolved, quite against the will of their magistrates, to put their laws into the form of a complete code, with specified penalties affixed.

* Bancroft, i. 443.

A committee of two magistrates, two ministers of the gos pel, and two men directly from the people, accomplished this delicate task; and the first published code of this colony went into full effect. Would it show a clear advance in the direction of liberty? No: it was yet too early for this. As might have been expected, when these old representatives of Puritanic justice put pen to paper, they went promptly back to what they deemed first principles, and adopted the sternest measures to check and utterly put down the weakness and vice of toleration.

They had demanded for themselves simply liberty to do right. This they would concede to all others: nothing more, upon the peril of their souls. Hear them: "Albeit faith is not wrought by the sword, but the Word, nevertheless, seeing that blasphemy of the true God cannot be excused by any ignorance or infirmity of human nature, no person in this jurisdiction, whether Christian or Pagan, shall wittingly and willingly presume to blaspheme his holy name, either by wilful or obstinate denying the true God, or his creation or government of the world; or shall curse God; or reproach the holy religion of God, as if it were but a public device to keep ignorant men in awe; nor shall utter any other eminent kind of blasphemy of like nature or degree." If they did, the penalty was death.

Hear them again; they are terribly in earnest: "Although no human power be lord over the faith and consciences of men, yet because such as bring in damnable heresies, tending to the subversion of the Christian faith, and destruction of the souls of men, ought duly to be restrained from such notorious impieties, any Christian within this jurisdiction, who shall go about to subvert or destroy the Christian faith and religion by broaching and maintaining any damnable heresies, as denying the immortality of the soul, or resurrection of the body; or any sin to be repented of in the regenerate; or any evil done by the outward man to be accounted sin; or denying that Christ gave himself a ransom for our

sins; or shall affirm that we are not justified by his death and righteousness, but by the perfections of our own works; or shall deny the morality of the fourth commandment; or shall openly condemn or oppose the baptizing of infants; or shall purposely depart the congregation at the administration of that ordinance; or shall deny the ordinance of magistracy, or their lawful authority to make war, or to punish the outward breaches of the first table; or shall endeavor to seduce others to any of the errors and heresies above mentioned," any such were liable to banishment.

"Jesuits were forbidden to enter the colony, and their second coming was punishable with death. Another law a few years after subjected to fine, whipping, banishment, and finally to death, any who denied the received books of the Old and New Testament to be the infallible word of God." *

These were fearful crimes, in the main enormous heresies, beyond a doubt; and the horror with which they were contemplated shows the depth and strength of religious principle and feeling which controlled the spirits of these noble men. But assuming that civil force and legal penalties were for such sinners, and that only the good and the orthodox were entitled to the blessings of protection and citizenship, they reached the point where Puritan logic took on its most subtle and obstinate fallacy, and beyond which it could not pass.

Arrests, whipping, imprisonment, banishment of Anabaptists and Quakers upon pain of death, would be possible for a while longer.

Religion, however, was not to be a subjugated element in New England: it was to be the guide of civil law and the paramount power of the land. "New England," the Puritan said, “was a religious plantation, not a plantation for trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship, and devotion, was written on her forehead." "We all," said the constitution of the oldest confederacy, "came into these

* Hildreth, i. 370.

parts of America to enjoy the liberties of the gospel in purity and peace." "He that made religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, had not the spirit of a true NewEngland man." "New England was the colony of conscience." These transcendent facts, united with convictions of exclusive rights, produced intolerance, but with "another spirit," under the conduct of Omniscience, would lead to the highest, noblest forms of organic freedom.

Outside of New England, religious freedom was firmly and steadily advancing. But God had not changed the order of his providence. The sun of American liberty would rise in the east. The morning star to the Western continent sent forth a mild and beautiful radiance from the little commonwealth of Rhode Island.

We may now distinctly see the character and mission of the Puritans. They were the Protestants of liberty. God had given them that singular combination of meekness and self-respect, of self-abnegation and sharply-defined individuality, which dashed aside the minions of power, while they humbly acknowledged the sacredness of the traditional authority under which they suffered all the horrors of martyrdom. They were bold, persistent protestants against the bitter wrongs inflicted by king, prelates, and parliament, but devoted friends of the crown and church of England. Imbued with the feelings and purposes of religious, irresistible destiny, they rose up against the tyranny which oppressed them in the Old World; and they would resist to the death the same tyranny in the New. With respect to the Church, they were not separatists; with respect to the Government, they were royalists: but holding that God was above both Church and State, and that nothing belonged legitimately to the British Constitution which was in the slightest degree contrary to the Holy Bible, they appealed from cruel laws to the statutes from Heaven, and from tyrants to God. Puritanism was therefore Christian loyalty to God, and to British sovereignty subjected to the divine

will. As the Lord's people, they were his representatives: they would therefore arraign royalty for its crimes, and punish heretics. Precisely here Puritanism alone reached its ultimate power in behalf of liberty.

ACCESSORY FORCES.

Let us now observe how evidently the grasp and reach of that power which presided over the mental struggle that preceded the War of Independence exceed every thing merely human. The combinations which seem to have most of finite man in them must be of materials which lie immediately about him, or at least are easily accessible, and whose relations are naturally and superficially suggested. When, however, a work is to be accomplished which is too profound and vast for delegated human wisdom, too good and important to be intrusted to human discretion, you may then see how wide the circle of power, how numerous and improbable, how distant and unlike each other, are the agencies and elements which produce the result that all sound minds must declare is the work of God. In nothing is this more evident than in the great combinations now under review for the structure of the American Republic.

From Italy, France, Spain, Holland, and England, God called up the men and movements for the discovery and colonization of the continent. Under his controlling hand, the strongest went down, and the weakest rose to power: the first became last, and the last became first. From the ruling classes in England he brought forward "gentlemen" who would try the strength of aristocratic power for the formation of States in the South, and place within fair reach of liberty the grand antagonist force with which it was to grapple in deadly conflict, and over which it must finally triumph. From the middle and laboring classes of the same country he summoned the mind and the muscle which would illustrate the force and sphere of man, as man, in conducting

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