to whom, more than
to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England,
and America are due, were to be hunted out of churches into farm-houses,
suburban hovels, and canal-boats by the arm of provincial sovereignty and
in the name of state-rights, as pitilessly as the early reformers had
been driven out of cathedrals in the name of emperor and pope; and when
even those refuges for conscientious worship were to be denied by the
dominant sect. And the day was to come, too, when the Calvinists,
regaining ascendency in their turn, were to hunt the heterodox as they
had themselves been hunted; and this, at the very moment when their
fellow Calvinists of England were driven by the Church of that kingdom
into the American wilderness.

Toleration--that intolerable term of insult to all who love liberty--had
not yet been discovered. It had scarcely occurred to Arminian or
Presbyterian that civil authority and ecclesiastical doctrine could be
divorced from each other. As the individual sovereignty of the seven
states established itself more and more securely, the right of provincial
power to dictate religious dogmas, and to superintend the popular
conscience, was exercised with a placid arrogance which papal
infallibility could scarcely exceed. The alternation was only between the
sects, each in its turn becoming orthodox, and therefore persecuting. The
lessened intensity of persecution however, which priesthood and authority
were now allowed to exercise, marked the gains secured.

Yet while we censure--as we have a right to do from the point of view
which we have gained after centuries--the crimes committed by bigotry
against liberty, we should be false, to our faith in human progress did
we not acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the hot gospellers of Holland
and England.

The doctrine of predestination, the consciousness of being chosen
soldiers of Christ, inspired those puritans, who founded the
commonwealths of England, of Holland, and of America, with a contempt of
toil, danger, and death which enabled them to accomplish things almost
supernatural.

No uncouthness of phraseology, no unlovely austerity of deportment,
could, except to vulgar minds, make that sublime enthusiasm ridiculous,
which on either side the ocean ever confronted tyranny with dauntless
front, and welcomed death on battle-field, scaffold, or rack with perfect
composure.

The early puritan at least believed. The very intensity of