s a very
malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the
English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from
all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no
longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family
prayers. After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary
to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep
quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony
with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that
sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out
accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of
mutual respect and love. A little later, a clever woman, Mrs. Ann
Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the
ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace,
demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with
personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony
of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone
of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether
ecclesiastical or civil. She seems clearly to have been a willful and
persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons
for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the
wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers
came among them,--not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to
which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early
type,--instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses
against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of
court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus
putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that
crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which
they were not fully entitled.

Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England
Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that
principle. It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger
Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to
enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might
be puzzled to name any other church establishment under which less of
molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of