bout this time the wheat
of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.

Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
fro, in s