conscience to be the only infallible guide. We cannot blame the Puritans;
they had paid a high price for their faith, and they could not but guard
it jealously. Their greatest peril seemed to them to be dissension or
disagreements on points of belief; except they held together, their whole
cause was lost. Williams was no less an exile for conscience' sake than
they; but as he persisted in having a conscience strictly his own, instead
of pooling it with that of the church, they were constrained to let him
go. They did not perceive, then or afterward, that such action argued
feeble faith. They could not, after all, quite trust God to take care of
His own; they dared not believe that He could reveal Himself to others as
well as to them; they feared to admit that they could have less than the
whole truth in their keeping. So they banished, whipped, pilloried, and
finally even hanged dissenters from their dissent. We, whose religious
tolerance is perhaps as excessive as theirs was deficient, are slow to
excuse them for this; but they believed they were fighting for much more
than their lives; and as for faith in God, it is surely no worse to fall
into error regarding it than to dismiss it altogether.

In a community where the integrity of the church was the main subject of
concern, it could not be long before religious conservatism would be
reflected in the political field. Representative government was conceded
in theory; but in practice, Winthrop and others thought that it would be
better ignored; the people could not easily meet for deliberations, and
how could their affairs be in better hands than those of the saints, who
already had charge of them? But the people declined to surrender their
liberties; there should be rotation in office; voting should be by ballot
instead of show of hands. Taxation was restricted; and in 1635 there was
agitation for a written constitution; and the relative authority of the
deputies and the assistants was in debate. Our national predisposition to
"talk politics" had already been born.