regulated in England by the hand of public authority. But that
hand had not been uniform or steady in its operations. During
the persecutions inflicted in the interval of Popish restoration
under the reign of Mary, upon all who favored the
Reformation, many of the most zealous reformers had been
compelled to fly their country. While residing on the continent
of Europe, they had adopted the principles of the most
complete and rigorous reformation, as taught and established
by Calvin. On returning afterward to their native country, they
were dissatisfied with the partial reformation, at which, as they
conceived, the English establishment had rested; and claiming
the privilege of private conscience, upon which alone any
departure from the Church of Rome could be justified, they
insisted upon the right of adhering to the system of their own
preference, and, of course, upon that of non-conformity to the
establishment prescribed by the royal authority. The only
means used to convince them of error and reclaim them from
dissent was force, and force served but to confirm the
opposition it was meant to suppress. By driving the founders
of the Plymouth Colony into exile, it constrained them to
absolute separation irreconcilable. Viewing their religious
liberties here, as held only by sufferance, yet bound to them by
all the ties of conviction, and by all their sufferings for them,
could they forbear to look upon every dissenter among
themselves with a jealous eye? Within two years after their
landing, they beheld a rival settlement attempted in their
immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the laws of self-
preservation compelled them to break up a nest of revellers,
who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who
had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding