e an impartial estimate of their character may be formed. They
had noble qualities: the firmness and energy which they displayed in the
colonization of New England must always command admiration. We would not
rob them, were it in our power to do so, of one jot or tittle of their
rightful honor. But, with all the lights which we at present possess, we
cannot allow their claim of saintship without some degree of
qualification. How they seemed to their Dutch neighbors at New
Netherlands, and their French ones at Nova Scotia, and to the poor
Indians, hunted from their fisheries and game-grounds, we can very well
conjecture. It may be safely taken for granted that their gospel claim
to the inheritance of the earth was not a little questionable to the
Catholic fleeing for his life from their jurisdiction, to the banished
Baptist shaking off the dust of his feet against them, and to the
martyred Quaker denouncing woe and judgment upon them from the steps of
the gallows. Most of them were, beyond a doubt, pious and sincere; but
we are constrained to believe that among them were those who wore the
livery of heaven from purely selfish motives, in a community where
church-membership was an indispensable requisite, the only open sesame
before which the doors of honor and distinction swung wide to needy or
ambitious aspirants. Mere adventurers, men of desperate fortunes,
bankrupts in character and purse, contrived to make gain of godliness
under the church and state government of New England, put on the austere
exterior of sanctity, quoted Scripture, anathematized heretics, whipped
Quakers, exterminated Indians, burned and spoiled the villages of their
Catholic neighbors, and hewed down their graven images and "houses of
Rimmon." It is curious to observe how a fierce religious zeal against
heathen and idolaters went hand in hand with the old Anglo-Saxon love of
land and plunder. Every crusade undertaken against the Papists of the
French colonies had its Puritan Peter the Hermit to summon the saints to
the wars of the Lord. At the siege of Louisburg, ten years before the
onslaught upon the Acadian settlers, one minister marched with the
Colonial troops, axe in hand, to hew down the images in the French
churches; while another officiated in the double capacity of drummer and
chaplain,--a "drum ecclesiastic," as Hudibras has it.

At the late celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims in New York, the
orator of the day labored