ing to a committee of
the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting
and oppressing of God's ministers and precious saints," said Mr. Flint
of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained
that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having
dealt too leniently with the Quakers.

And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to
the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for
some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were
still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in
1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of
persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation,
indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a
tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers
from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in
Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material
interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the
founders. "The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr. Harris in
1675, "and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London." In
1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish,
provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the
English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to
prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for
the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material
interests thus came into competition with the interests of religion, not
a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and
moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.

The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and
magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of
Massachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of
Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the
party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and
uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to cooeperate with
Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony
by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant
of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates
were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682