controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
by theological controversy.

In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
block among its branches now.

One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational