companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.

It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about 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