name; complete toleration for
the Church of England; the repeal of the law which restricted the
privilege of voting, and tenure of office to Church members, and the
substitution of property qualification instead; finally, the admission
of all persons of honest lives to the sacraments of Baptism and the
Lord's Supper.

"The claimants for toleration, formerly suppressed with such prompt
severity, were now encouraged, by the King's demands in their favour,
again to raise their heads. For the next thirty years the people of
Massachusetts (Bay) were divided into three parties, a very decided,
though gradually diminishing majority (of the Congregationalists, the
only "freemen") sustaining with ardour the theocratic system, and, as
essential to it, entire independence of external control. At the
opposite extreme, a party, small in numbers and feeble in influence
(among the "freemen"), advocated religious toleration--at least to a
limited extent--and equal civil rights for all inhabitants. They
advocated, also, the supremacy of the Crown, sole means in that day of
curbing the theocracy, and compelling it to yield its monopoly of power.
To this party belonged the Episcopalians, or those inclined to become
so; the Baptists, Presbyterians, the Quakers, and other sectaries who
feared less the authority of a distant monarch than the present rule of
their watchful and bitter spiritual rivals. In the intermediate was a
third party, weak at first but daily growing stronger, and drawing to
its ranks, one after another, some former zealous advocates of the
exclusive system, convinced that a _theocracy_, in its stricter form,
was no longer tenable, and some of them, perhaps, beginning to be
satisfied that it was not desirable. Among the earliest of these were
Norton and Bradstreet, the agents who came back from England impressed
with the necessity of yielding. But the avowal of such sentiments was
fatal to their popularity (among the Congregational "freemen"), and
Norton, accustomed to nothing but reverence and applause, finding
himself now looked at with distrust, soon died of melancholy and
mortification." (Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. I., Chap.
xiv., pp. 455, 456.)]

[Footnote 128: Collection of Massachusetts, etc., Civil Society, Vol.
VIII., Second Series, p. 53.]

[Footnote 129: Collections of Massachusetts, etc., Civil Society, _Vol_.
VIII., Second Series, pp. 59, 60.]

[Footnote 130: From the representations m