oints, both of doctrine and
discipline. The main question, it was admitted on all hands, most
intimately concerned the highest interests 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
afterward 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 non-conformity 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 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 revellers, 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 savages with the means, the skill, and the
instruments o