only they were not so set upon proclaiming and acting upon them in season
and out of season; they contended that the idolatry of ritual, since it
had been several centuries growing up, should be allowed an appreciable
time to disappear. It will easily be understood that, at the bottom of
these religious innovations and inflammations, was a simple movement
toward greater human freedom in all directions, including the political.
It mattered little to the zealots on either side whether or not the secret
life of a man was morally correct; he must think in a certain prescribed
way, on pain of being held damnable, and, if occasion served, of being
sent to the other world before he had opportunity to further confirm his
damnation. The dissenters, when they got in motion, were just as
intolerant and bigoted as the conformists; and toward none was this
intolerance more strongly manifested than toward such as were in the main,
but not altogether, of their way of thinking. The Quakers and the
Independents had almost as hard an experience in New England, at the hands
of the Puritans, as the latter had endured from good Queen Bess and her
henchmen a few years before. But really, religion, in the absolute sense,
had very little to do with these movements and conflicts; the impulse was
supposed to be religion because religion dwells in the most interior
region of a man's soul. But the craving for freedom also proceeds from an
interior place; and so does the lust for tyranny. Propinquity was mistaken
for identity, and anything which was felt but could not be reasoned about
assumed a religious aspect to the subject of it, and all the artillery of
Heaven and Hell, and the vocabulary thereof, were pressed into service to
champion it.

But New England had to be peopled, and this was the way to people it. The
dissenters perceived that, though they might think as they pleased in
England, they could not combine this privilege with keeping clear of the
fagot or the gibbet; and though martyrdom is honorable, and perhaps