followed the
example of Roger Williams by seeking a refuge among the Indians, who
treated him kindly. The two Quaker women were transported to Barbadoes,
and the captain of the vessel which had brought them to Boston was
required to bear the charges of their imprisonment. The religious books
which they had in their possession when arrested were burned by the
common hangman.

The Quakers continued to come in considerable numbers to America, being
welcomed in some of the colonies, and persecuted in others, but nowhere
so severely as in Massachusetts. When Stephenson and Robinson were hanged
at Boston, Mary Dyer, widow of William Dyer, late recorder of Providence
plantations, was taken to the scaffold with them, but reprieved on
condition that she should leave the colony in forty-eight hours. In the
following year Mary Dyer returned to Boston, and was at once arrested and
hanged. These proceedings excited general horror in the mother country,
and Charles II. sent a letter stating it to be his pleasure that the
Quakers should be sent to England for trial. The General Court of
Massachusetts thereupon suspended the laws against Quakers, and those in
prison were released and sent out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

* * *

Next to the persecution of the Quakers no feature of Puritan history is
so prominent as the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy, which, although it occurred
near the close of the seventeenth century, so strikingly illustrates the
intellectual and religious conditions of the Massachusetts colony that it
may properly be described here. Belief in witchcraft was not by any means
confined to Massachusetts. The statutes of England, as well as of the
American colonies, dealt with the imaginary crime. Among the intelligent
and educated classes, however, both in Europe and America, the subject
was generally considered of too doubtful a nature to be dealt with by the
infliction of the penalties which the law prescribed. In Massachusetts,
where everybody had some education, the majority of the people, although
deeply and almost fanatically religious, had their doubts about the
reality of the diabolical art, and the belief, strangely enough, seems to
have been most intense and aggressive in the highest intellectual
quarters, among ministers and men of superior education and commensurate
influence. It was this that gave the witchcraft delusion its awful power
for evil, and enabled a