doctrine or practize... and in case of ordination... timely notice thereof
shall be given unto three or fower of the neighbouring organicke churches
for theire approbation." [Footnote: _Mass. Rec._ iv. pt. 1, p. 328.] And
lastly, in 1679, the building of meeting-houses was forbidden, without
leave from the freemen of the town or the General Court. [Footnote:
_Mass. Rec._ v. 213.]

But legislation has never yet controlled the action of human thought. All
experience shows that every age, and every western nation, produces men
whose nature it is to follow the guidance of their reason in the face of
every danger. To exterminate these is the task of religious persecution,
for they can be silenced only by death. Thus is a dominant priesthood
brought face to face with the alternative, of surrendering its power or of
killing the heretic, and those bloody deeds that cast their sombre shadow
across the history of the Puritan Commonwealth cannot be seen in their
true bearing unless the position of the clergy is vividly before the mind.

Cromwell said that ministers were "helpers of, not lords over, God's
people," [Footnote: Cromwell to Dundass, letter cxlviii. Carlyle's
_Cromwell_, iii. 72.] but the orthodox New Englander was the vassal
of his priest. Winthrop was the ablest and the most enlightened magistrate
the ecclesiastical party ever had, and he tells us that "I honoured a
faithful minister in my heart and could have kissed his feet." [Footnote:
_Life and Letters of Winthrop_, i. 61.] If the governor of
Massachusetts and the leader of the emigration could thus describe his
moral growth,--a man of birth, education, and fortune, who had had wide
experience of life, and was a lawyer by profession,--the awe and terror
felt by the mass of the communicants can be imagined.

Jonathan Mitchel, one of the most famous of the earlier divines, thus