vital social question: Are belief and
conduct in matters religious to be determined by the social will
registered in decrees of Church or State, or by the individual will
following the promptings of reason and conscience? For most dissenters
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a logical
difficulty in assenting to the first proposition and a practical
objection to assenting to the second: it was logically difficult to deny
the authority of Rome, which the practice and traditions of centuries
had recognized as voicing the will of Christendom, without denying the
validity of any external authority whatever; but it was practically
impossible to appeal unreservedly to the authority of the individual
reason and conscience without running into free thought and allowing
religion to dissolve in an infinite variety of opinion. Generally
speaking, most Protestant sects appealed from the outer to the inner
authority in order to establish their beliefs, and then from the inner
to the outer authority in order to maintain them. Luther himself, having
denied the right of the Church to compel his conscience, straightway
maintained that it was not for _Herr Omnes_ to determine matters of
religion, and fell back on the State as the defender of his faith
against the dangers of dissent. But it is indeed true that "the business
of dissenters is to dissent"; and the Massachusetts magistrates found
that the very arguments they had used to deny the authority of Laud were
now employed to deny their own. This was the logical opening in the
Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but
a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very
principles upon which it had been originally established.

If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in
the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The
authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point,
never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself
passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular
opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve
the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and
for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pushing their
extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging
after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which
mark