and dissolute visitants of the country to be forgotten among the agents
of a moral revolution. Freebooters from the West Indies and the Spanish
Main,--state criminals, implicated in the numerous plots and
conspiracies of the period,--felons, loaded with private guilt,--numbers
of these took refuge in the provinces, where the authority of the
English king was obstructed by a zealous spirit of independence, and
where a boundless wilderness enabled them to defy pursuit. Thus the new
population, temporary and permanent, was exceedingly unlike the old, and
far more apt to disseminate their own principles than to imbibe those of
the Puritans. All circumstances unfavorable to virtue acquired double
strength by the licentious reign of Charles II.; though perhaps the
example of the monarch and nobility was less likely to recommend vice to
the people of New England than to those of any other part of the British
Empire.

The clergy and the elder magistrates manifested a quick sensibility to
the decline of godliness, their apprehensions being sharpened in this
particular no less by a holy zeal than because their credit and
influence were intimately connected with the primitive character of the
country. A Synod, convened in the year 1679, gave its opinion that the
iniquity of the times had drawn down judgments from Heaven, and proposed
methods to assuage the Divine wrath by a renewal of former sanctity.
But neither the increased numbers nor the altered spirit of the people,
nor the just sense of a freedom to do wrong, within certain limits,
would now have permitted the exercise of that inquisitorial strictness,
which had been wont to penetrate to men's firesides and watch their
domestic life, recognizing no distinction between private ill conduct
and crimes that endanger the community. Accordingly, the tide of
worldly principles encroached more and more upon the ancient landmarks,
hitherto esteemed the enter boundaries of virtue. Society arranged