re perfect
union which still endures.

IV

Neither revolution in England nor the stress of conflicting ideals in
the colony turned the first generation of Massachusetts Bay leaders from
the straight course which they had laid. Magistrates and clergy went
steadily forward, emerging from Nonconformity into practical Separatism,
as resistant to Parliamentary as to royal control, as cool toward
Cromwell as toward Charles. During the quarter-century of their
domination, Massachusetts maintained a virtual independence of the
mother country and the effective leadership of Now England. Towards the
middle of the century the theocratic principle might have seemed more
firmly established than ever before. The relative tranquillity which
followed the banishment of Anne Hutchinson appeared to be a clear
justification of the action of the general court on that occasion. It
was therefore without hesitation that the authorities acted when Anne
Austin and Mary Fisher, two Quaker missionaries from Barbados, arrived
at Boston in 1656. The women were reshipped to Barbados; and a law was
straightway enacted which decreed the flogging and imprisonment of any
of the "cursed sect of haeritics commonly called Quakers" who might come
within the colony's jurisdiction.

In the seventeenth century, it was agreed that, next to the Muenster
Anabaptists, the Quakers were of all dissenting sects the most pestilent
and blasphemous. They used no force in propagating their beliefs or in
defending their lives. They were believers in equality, and refused to
doff their hats to any man, respecting neither magistrate nor priest.
They were believers in liberty; no man to be restrained in matters of
opinion; but every man to go or come, to speak or remain silent, as
God's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And
it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the
unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and
reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and
stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's
portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all
suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come."
And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the
reserved and seemly Puritans of Boston, with scandalous impropriety of
action bringing the staid Sunday sermon or Thursday lecture to
irrem