ow it has been said that, had Episcopal worship been tolerated at
Massachusetts Bay, Laud would have soon planted the hierarchy there,
with all his ceremonies and intolerance. This objection is mere fancy
and pretence. It is fancy--for the Corporation, and not Laud, was the
chartered authority to provide for religious instruction as well as
settlement and trade in the new Plantation, as illustrated from the very
fact of the Company having selected and employed the first ministers, as
well as first Governor and other officers, for the two-fold work of
spreading religion and extending the King's dominions in New England.
The objection is mere pretence, for it could not have been dread of the
Church of England, which dictated its abolition and the banishment of
its members, since precisely the same spirit of bigotry, persecution,
and proscription prevailed, not only against Roger Williams, Mrs.
Hutchinson and her brother Wright and their friends, but in 1646 against
the Presbyterians, and in 1656 against the Baptists, as will hereafter
appear.

Their iron-bound, shrivelled creed of eternal, exclusive election
produced an iron-hearted population, whose hand was against every man
not of their tribal faith and tribal independence; but at the same time
not embodying in their civil or ecclesiastical polity a single element
of liberty or charity which any free State or Church would at this day
be willing to adopt or recognize as its distinctive constitution or
mission.

It was the utter absence of both the principles and spirit of true civil
and religious liberty in the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, and in their
brethren under the Commonwealth and Cromwell in England, that left
Nonconformists without a plea for toleration under Charles the Second,
from the example of their own party on either side of the Atlantic, and
that has to this day furnished the most effective argument to opponents
against dissenters' pretensions to liberality and liberty, and the
strongest barrier against their political influence in England. They
were prostrate and powerless when the liberal Churchmen, guided by the
views of Chillingworth, Burnet, and Tillotson, under William and Mary,
obtained the first Parliamentary enactment for religious toleration in
England. It is to the same influence that religious liberty in England
has been enlarged from time to time; and, at this day, it is to the
exertions and influence of liberal Churchmen, both in and ou