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Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II - With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions - on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects by Charles Upham
page 160 of 1066 (15%)
The men who sought this far-off "nook and corner of the world,"
crossing a tempestuous and dangerous ocean, and landing on the shores
of a wilderness, leaving every thing, however dear and valuable,
behind, came to have a country and a social system for themselves and
of themselves alone. Their resolve was inexorable not to allow the
mother-country, or the whole outside world combined, to interfere with
them. And it was equally inexorable not to suffer dissent or any
discordant element to get foothold among them. Sir Christopher
Gardner's rank and title could not save him: he was not of the sort
they wanted, and they shipped him back. Roger Williams's virtues,
learning, apostolic piety, could not save him; and they drove him into
a wintry wilderness, hunting him beyond their borders. It was not so
much a question whether Baptists, Antinomians, or Quakers were right
or wrong, as a preformed determination not to have any dissentients of
any description among them. They had sacrificed all to find and to
make a country for themselves, and they meant to keep it to
themselves. They had gone out of everybody else's way, and they did
not mean to let anybody else come into their way. They did not
understand the great truth which Hugh Peters preached to Parliament,
"Why," said he, "cannot Christians differ, and yet be friends? All
children should be fed, though they have different faces and shapes:
unity, not uniformity, is the Christian word." They admitted no such
notion as this. They thought uniformity the only basis of unity. They
meant to make and to keep this a country after their own pattern, a
Congregational, Puritan, Cambridge-Platform-man's country. The time
has not yet come when we can lift up clean hands against them. Two
successive chief-magistrates of the United States have opened the door
and signified to one-eighth part of our whole people, that it will be
best for them to walk out. So long as the doctrine is maintained that
this is the white man's country, or any man's, or any class or kind of
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