of man, both
temporal and eternal. Can we wonder that men who felt their
happiness here and their hopes of hereafter, their worldly welfare
and the kingdom of heaven at stake, should sometimes attach an
importance beyond their intrinsic weight to collateral points of
controversy, connected with the all-involving object of the
reformation? The changes in the forms and principles of religious
worship were introduced and regulated in England by the hand of
public authority. But that hand had not been uniform or steady in
its operations. During the persecutions inflicted in the interval
of Popish restoration under the reign of Mary, upon all who favored
the reformation, many of the most zealous reformers had been
compelled to fly their country. While residing on the continent of
Europe, they had adopted the principles of the most complete and
rigorous reformation, as taught and established by Calvin. On
returning afterwards to their native country, they were dissatisfied
with the partial reformation, at which, as they conceived, the
English establishment had rested; and claiming the privilege of
private conscience, upon which alone any departure from the Church
of Rome could be justified, they insisted upon the right of adhering
to the system of their own preference, and, of course, upon that of
nonconformity to the establishment prescribed by the royal
authority. The only means used to convince them of error and
reclaim them from dissent was force, and force served but to confirm
the opposition it was meant to suppress. By driving the founders of
the Plymouth Colony into exile, it constrained them to absolute
separation from the Church of England; and by the refusal afterwards
to allow them a positive toleration, even in this American
wilderness, the council of James I. rendered that separation
irreconcilable. Viewing their religious liberties here, as held
only by sufferance, yet bound to them by all the ties of conviction,
and by all their sufferings for them, could they forbear to look
upon every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye? Within
two years after their landing, they beheld a rival settlement
attempted in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the
laws of self-preservation compelled them to break up a nest of
revelers, who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who
had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding their
wanton idleness, by furnishing the sav