Creative Books

In England they did not wish to
be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
their settlements and let them alone.


Pages:
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46