this was worse. Here
all was deliberately calm; all was sanctioned by religion. It was no
outbreak of mere brutality. The fast was kept; the Sabbath was observed;
the staff of office, as a sacred ensign, was consecrated by one
Christian minister, while another attended upon the marching of
soldiery, and cheered them in the murderous design with his presence and
his prayers. Piety was supposed not to abhor, but to exult in the
exploit. This was true fanaticism. God's word and ordinances were made
subservient to the greatest crimes. They were rudely forced and
violated, and made the ministers of sin. When the assailants, reeking
from the slaughter and blackened with the smoke, returned home, they
were everywhere received with a pious ovation. God was devoutly praised,
because the first principles of justice, nay, the stinted humanities of
war, had been outraged, and unresisting savages, with their wives and
children, had been ferociously destroyed." (Marsden's History of the
Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305-311.)

Such was the early Puritan method of fulfilling the Royal Charter to the
Massachusetts Company of "Christianizing and civilizing the idolatrous
Indians;" and such is a practical comment upon Colonel Barre's statement
as to Indian cruelties.

But the intolerance of the Puritans to each other was as conspicuous as
their cruel treatment of the Indians. On this point Mr. Marsden adds:

"The intolerance with which the Puritans had been treated at home might
at least have taught them a lesson of forbearance to each other. But it
had no such effect. It would almost seem as if, true disciples in the
school of the High Commission and Star Chamber, their ambition was to
excel their former tyrants in the art of persecution. They imitated,
with a pertinacious accuracy, the bad examples of their worst
oppressors; and with far less to excuse them, repeated in America the
self-same crimes from which they and their fathers had suffered so much
in England. No political considerations of real importance, no ancient
prejudices interwoven with the framework of society, could be pleaded
here. Their institutions were new, their course was hampered by no
precedents. Imagination cannot suggest a state of things more favourable
to the easy, safe, and sure development of their views. Had they
cherished a catholic spirit, there was nothing to prevent the exercise
of the most enlarged beneficence. Their choice was made freely, and they