of the infant colony of Massachusetts afforded, and, by a sort of delusive
piety, into whose merits we have no desire to look, he thought he had also
furnished a commendable evidence of his own desperate resignation to the
will of Providence, in causing him to be publicly christened by the name
of Content. His own baptismal appellation was Mark; as indeed had been
that of most of his ancestors, for two or three centuries. When the world
was a little uppermost in his thoughts, as sometimes happens with the most
humbled spirits, he had even been heard to speak of a Sir Mark of his
family, who had ridden a knight in the train of one of the more warlike
kings of his native land.

There is some ground for believing, that the great parent of evil early
looked with a malignant eye on the example of peacefulness, and of
unbending morality, that the colonists of New-England were setting to the
rest of Christendom. At any rate, come from what quarter they might,
schisms and doctrinal contentions arose among the emigrants themselves;
and men, who together had deserted the fire-sides of their forefathers in
quest of religious peace, were ere long seen separating their fortunes, in
order that each might enjoy, unmolested, those peculiar shades of faith,
which all had the presumption, no less than the folly, to believe were
necessary to propitiate the omnipotent and merciful father of the
universe. If our task were one of theology, a wholesome moral on the
vanity, no less than on the absurdity of the race, might be here
introduced to some advantage.

When Mark Heathcote announced to the community, in which he had now
sojourned more than twenty years, that he intended for a second time to
establish his altars in the wilderness, in the hope that he and his
household might worship God as to them seemed most right, the intelligence
was received with a feeling allied to awe. Doctrine and zeal were