primal gift of God to his intelligent creatures,
and is the kingly dower of every human soul. She was not born with the
Puritans, nor did she die with them. In no age or land, among no sect or
people, has she been without her priesthood, her altar, her ritual, her
heart worship. Nor is she to blame for the wrongs and atrocities
committed in her name. The ideas and principles the Puritans were
ordained to carry out and embody in a great political structure were of
the noblest, rarest, most enduring and beneficent; the faults that
marred the beauty and consistency of their own character, were the
exaggerations of their virtues, and arose from the frailty and
instability of the human heart, even when most governed and inspired by
the highest motives. The principles remain steadfast, immovable,
immortal; the defects we can but grieve over and forgive for the sake of
the grandeur they only marred but could not destroy.

Through the weakness of our nature, through the deceitfulness of the
heart, the zeal which, in its proper exercise, is admirable, as inciting
us to a grand enthusiasm in a cause believed to be true and holy,
ofttimes degenerates into a blind and bitter bigotry, as unreasoning as
reprehensible; the faith which pierces the unseen and eternal, and fixes
its calm eye on One who sits changeless amid infinite series of changes,
all-wise amid infinite follies and wickednesses of His creatures,
all-merciful and all-loving amid the hate and opposition of weak, finite
hearts, becomes a gloomy asceticism, or a fierce inquisitorial
despotism, perverting Him--this glorious and loving God--into a cold,
selfish, unreasonable Being, as far removed from our sympathies and love
as He is from caring for us, and only existing to receive the hateful
homage of fearful and enslaved souls; and what _was_ a high,
disinterested, fearless devotion to truth and duty becomes a narrow,
selfish, insane thirst for the ascendency of sect or party, or the
propagation of some pet dogmas, which, so far from touching practically
the happiness, duty, or destiny of the soul, are mere stumbling stones,
strewing the dark mountains of vain, egotistic, arrogant human
speculation. As there is no power so relentless as a theological or
spiritual despotism, so there is no tendency of the mind more easy,
subtle, or strong, than a tendency toward it. To say these men erred, is
to say that they were men. But if they partook of the common liability
to error