f a century, and was
productive of very important results. But the several colonies
continued to make laws for their own people, to repress anarchy, and
favor the cause of religion and unity. They did not always exhibit a
liberal and enlightened policy. They destroyed witches; persecuted the
Baptists and Quakers, and excluded them from their settlements. But,
with the exception of religious persecution, their legislation was
wise, and their general conduct was virtuous. They encouraged schools,
and founded the University of Cambridge. They preserved the various
peculiarities of Puritanism in regard to amusements, to the observance
of the Sabbath, and to antipathy to any thing which reminded them of
Rome, or even of the Church of England. But Puritanism was not an
odious crust, a form, a dogma. It was a life, a reality; and was not
unfavorable to the development of the most beautiful virtues of
charity and benevolence, in a certain sphere. It was not a mere
traditional Puritanism, which clings with disgusting tenacity to a
form, when the spirit of love has departed; but it was a harmonious
development of living virtues, which sympathized with education, with
freedom, and with progress; which united men together by the bond of
Christian love, and incited them to deeds of active benevolence and
intrepid moral heroism. Nor did the Puritan Pilgrims persecute those
who did not harmonize with them in order to punish them, but simply to
protect themselves, and to preserve in their midst, and in their
original purity, those institutions and those rights, for the
possession of which they left their beloved native land for a savage
wilderness, with its countless perils and miseries. But their
hardships and afflictions were not of long continuance. With energy,
industry, frugality, and love, they soon obtained security, comfort,
and health. And it is no vain and idle imagination which assigns to
those years, which succeeded the successful planting of the colony,
the period of the greatest happiness and virtue which New England has
ever enjoyed.

Equally fortunate with the Puritans were those interesting people who
settled Pennsylvania. If the Quakers were persecuted in the mother
country and in New England, they found a shelter on the banks of the
Delaware. There they obtained and enjoyed that freedom of religious
worship which had been denied to the great founder of the sect, and
which had even been withheld from them by men who