gious freedom, and what they esteemed a purer form of religious
worship, than was allowed to their choice, or presented to their
imitation, in the Old World. The love of religious liberty is a stronger
sentiment, when fully excited, than an attachment to civil or political
freedom. That freedom which the conscience demands, and which men feel
bound by their hope of salvation to contend for, can hardly fail to be
attained. Conscience, in the cause of religion and the worship of the
Deity, prepares the mind to act and to suffer beyond almost all other
causes. It sometimes gives an impulse so irresistible, that no fetters
of power or of opinion can withstand it. History instructs us that this
love of religious liberty, a compound sentiment in the breast of man,
made up of the clearest sense of right and the highest conviction of
duty, is able to look the sternest despotism in the face, and, with
means apparently most inadequate, to shake principalities and powers.
There is a boldness, a spirit of daring, in religious reformers, not to
be measured by the general rules which control men's purposes and
actions. If the hand of power be laid upon it, this only seems to
augment its force and its elasticity, and to cause its action to be more
formidable and violent. Human invention has devised nothing, human
power has compassed nothing, that can forcibly restrain it, when it
breaks forth. Nothing can stop it, but to give way to it; nothing can
check it, but indulgence. It loses its power only when it has gained its
object. The principle of toleration, to which the world has come so
slowly, is at once the most just and the most wise of all principles.
Even when religious feeling takes a character of extravagance and
enthusiasm, and seems to threaten the order of society and shake the
columns of the social edifice, its principal danger is in its restraint.
If it be allowed indulgence and expansion, like the elemental fires, it
only agitates, and perhaps purifies, the atmosphere; while its efforts
to throw off restraint would burst the world asunder.

It is certain, that, although many of them were republicans in
principle, we have no evidence that our New England ancestors would have
emigrated, as they did, from their own native country, would have become
wanderers in Europe, and finally would have undertaken the establishment
of a colony here, merely from their dislike of the political systems of
Europe. They fled not so much from