tual respect to
mutual love, "that we henceforth, speaking truth in love, may grow up in
all things into him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the
body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint
supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part,
shall make the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in
love." Unless we must submit to those philosophers who forbid us to find
in history the evidences of final cause and providential design, we may
surely look upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of
Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its
ultimate stage of schism--that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the
mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to
bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the
children of God as the past ages of church history have failed to show.

That mutual intolerance of differences in religious belief which, in the
seventeenth century, was, throughout Christendom, coextensive with
religious earnestness had its important part to play in the colonization
of America. Of the persecutions and oppressions which gave direct
impulse to the earliest colonization of America, the most notable are
the following: (1) the persecution of the English Puritans in the reigns
of James I. and Charles I., ending with the outbreak of the civil war in
1642; (2) the persecution of the English Roman Catholics during the same
period; (3) the persecution of the English Quakers during the
twenty-five years of Charles II. (1660-85); (4) the persecution of the
French Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685); (5)
the disabilities suffered by the Presbyterians of the north of Ireland
after the English Revolution (1688); (6) the ferocious ravaging of the
region of the Rhenish Palatinate by the armies of Louis XIV. in the
early years of the seventeenth century; (7) the cruel expulsion of the
Protestants of the archiepiscopal duchy of Salzburg (1731).

Beyond dispute, the best and most potent elements in the settlement of
the seaboard colonies were the companies of earnestly religious people
who from time to time, under severe compulsion for conscience' sake,
came forth from the Old World as involuntary emigrants. Cruel wars and
persecutions accomplished a result in the advancement of the kingdom of
Christ which the authors of them never intended. But not th