phraseology of the General Court, ten years before, in the case of Obadiah Holmes, who, for his "corrupt conscience" in denying infant baptism, was ordered to be "well whipt." Thus were Moses and Aaron to kiss each other.

Cotton Mather calls the anniversary election, "the greatest aǹniversary solemnity of the land," and Eliot (Biog. Dict.) says: "It is a good observation, that 'the election sermon is the pulse by which we can tell the state of the body politick.'" Certainly this class of sermons, for the first hundred years of Massachusetts' history, gives us a clear view of the prevailing Puritan ideas of toleration and liberty. We have been at some pains to examine a large number of them, and to cull out such passages as best exhibit the method in which Moses and Aaron showed their mutual love; from which it will appear that to obnoxious heretics the performance must have been far from agreeable.

John Higginson, who succeeded his father Francis, at Salem, preached before the General Court, 1663, thirty-five years after the first settlement of the colony, and the third year of Charles II. Mather calls him "another Origen," a "reverend person, always valued for his useful preaching and his holy living." In this Election Sermon, "The cause of God and His Peace in New England," speaking of the "end of our coming hither," he says:

1. It was not a Toleration of all Religions, or of the Heresies and Idolatries of the age we live in. I say, not a toleration of these, so far as we have liberty and power to help it. How inconsistent would such a toleration be with the loved, the one true religion revealed in the Word of God. . . . . .The Gospel of Jesus Christ hath a right paramount. . . . . That which is contrary to the Gospel hath no rights, and therefore should have no liberty.

Which means, of course, that the Puritans, who alone walked according to the faith and order of the gospel, had the exclusive right to the free exercise of their religion. "Non-toleration of that which is contrary thereto," he declares to be "a glory to New England," as "a gradual yielding to the toleration of any false Religion would be a heinous backsliding, which the Lord's jealousy will not bear."

.....

Jonathan Mitchell, the "matchless," of "extraordinary learning, wisdom, gravity and piety," . . . . . "a circle, whereof the centre was at Cambridge, and the circumference took in more than all New England "so says the author of the "Magnalia "—was for eighteen years pastor of the Church at Cambridge. In his Election Sermon, 1667, addressing the "powers that be," he said:

Do not wrong and mar an excellent work and profession by mixing and weaving in spurious Principles or Practices; as those of Separation, Anabaptism; Morellian (anarchical confusion), and Licentious Toleration. . . . . Separation and Anabaptism are wonted Intruders and Seeming Friends, but secret, fatal Enemies to Reformation.

The next year, 1668, the eighth of Charles II, William Stoughton, of Dorchester, preached the Election Sermon. He was born in 1632. Eliot speaks of him as an eminent preacher. Three years after the above anniversary occasion, he seems to have turned his attention to politics, being chosen a magistrate in 1671, Lieutenant-Governor under the new charter of William and Mary, and then Chief Justice, in which last capacity he "caused innocent beings to suffer the most ignominious punishment," for the supposed crime of witchcraft. In his sermon he said:

No persuasion or practice can ever, in the conscience of the contraryminded, have a good right to public liberty and countenance, which being thoroughly attended to, doth indeed tend to the undermining, and so, in the issue, to the overthrow of the state of these churches, in that wherein it is of God, and hath been largely and plentifully owned by him. And, in this case, and the application thereof, those who are in authority may, and ought to, judge.

In 1672, Thomas Shepard, of Charlestown, son of Thomas Shepard of Cambridge-ornatissimus Shepardus, vir dignus. . . . alter Plato-as President Oakes, "the Lactantius of New England," styled him in a Commencement oration, after his death-preached the famous Election Sermon, called "Eye-Salve," in which, according to Cotton Mather, there is "constellated so much learning, wisdom, holiness and faithfulness, that he [the reader] will pronounce the author to have been a person of more than common talents for the service of our churches."

Remember [said Shepard] a main design of God's people's adventuring into this wilderness was for progress in the work of Reformation. Here they hoped they might enjoy Freedom to follow the Lord fully in all his ordinances and appointments; I say, to follow the Lord (not by halves, not still in way of mixtures in Religion, to have a medly of all sorts of Religion, but) fully; with what purity the Lord would give them light for, and power to enjoy without molestation. It was for Reformation, not for Toleration of all Religions: and awful are the words that fell from the pen of our famous Cotton, in his Bloody Tenent Washed, etc.: "It was Toleration that made the world Anti-Christian ; and the church never took hurt by the punishment of Hereticks. . . . . The Lord keep us from being bewitched with the whore's cup, lest,

while we seem to detest and reject her with open face of profession, we do yet bring her in by a back door of Toleration, and so come at last to drink deeply in the cup of the Lord's wrath, and be filled with the cup of her Plagues."

And it is to be hoped that this coercive power of a godly magistracy, which we have experienced the benefit of so many wayes, being duely managed, shall not be abandoned, nor therefore a Repealing of any wholesome Law about Religion for the defence and maintaining of the Gospel among us; or that liberty should be proclaimed to men of any Religion to come and set up Shops or Schools of Seduction among us. Are there those that say, that for the magistrate to meddle in matters of Religion, or to punish men if they do but plead conscience for their Sin, good will never come of it, and this is but persecution, and better let all alone, these things will die of themselves, etc.? . . . . But hath not the Leaders of this people, appearing by Synods, and the power of the civil Sword in conjunction therewith, been found upon experience the way whereby the Lord hath dispelled those clouds of the darkness of hell, that threatened both the Church and Civil State at once with confusion?

The fathers took special care for the continuance of the Kingdom of Christ here in after generations, by asserting their [children's] covenant interest therein; and therefore examine the experience of former times, and Anabaptisme we shall find hath ever been lookt at by the Godly leaders of this people as a Sin, to be contended against, being so cruel and hard-hearted an opinion, an Engine framed to cut the throat of the Infantry of the Church.

This sermon was specially commended to the churches by John Sherman and Urian Oakes; the former, minister at Watertown, and fellow of Harvard College, distinguished as a scholar and divine; the latter, minister at Cambridge, afterwards president of the college. The sermon was delivered in the last year of Governor Bellingham, a man of intolerant spirit, seven years after several Baptists of Charlestown had been disfranchised and imprisoned for their "hard-hearted" opinions, and thirteen years after the first hanging of Quakers.

The same year, 1672, Urian Oakes, three years after chosen president of Harvard College, preached the Artillery Election Sermon, which bore the portentious title of, "The Unconquerable, AllConquering, and More-than-Conquering Souldier," in which he said:

I wd address myself with a word or two of encouragement to our Pious and Honorable Rulers, not as they are Christians only, but Christian Magistrates also, and the Nursing Fathers of our Commonwealth and Churches ..... You have growing sins in a growing Commonwealth to grapple with. Do not draw your sword merely to flourish and beat the air, but strike home, etc.

What he understood by "striking home," is more clearly shown in the Election Sermon which he delivered the next year, entitled, "New-England Pleaded With ":

I look upon an unbounded Toleration as the first-born of all Abominations. If this should be once born and brought forth among us, you may call it Gad, and give the same reason that she did of the name of her son: Behold a troop cometh, even a Troop of all manner of Abominations..... No error is tolerable merely for Conscience sake. For then a conscientious Papist or Socinian or Quaker (the most notorious Heretick in the world), must be connived at and suffered; yea, all manner of Idolatry and Heresy must be tolerated in some persons..... No doubt but it belongs to the Magistrate to judge what is tolerable in his Dominions in this respect. And the eye of the Civil Magistrate is to be to the securing of the way of God that is duly established..... Boundless liberty will expose us to great danger.

The ensuing year, 1674, Samuel Torrey came up from Weymouth, to re-echo in the ears of the magistracy the intolerant sentiments of his more noted brethren. In his Election Sermon he maintained as

'unquestionable," that " open opposition to the Truth, the true churches, worship and ordinances of Christ. . . . . is intolerable."

Two years later, a passage in a letter of Dr. Increase Mather forms a curious commentary upon the above doctrine, levelled largely at Quakers-"A vessel from Ireland arrived here, being sent by the Quakers in Dublin for those who were impoverished by the war here." We find no record of this Quaker invasion being repulsed as dangerous by the General Court. The bread of heretics was good for starving Puritans.

But this noble return of good for evil seems to have only satisfied the stomachs, without ameliorating the sentiments, of Massachusetts Puritans; for, two years after, Samuel Willard, pastor of the Old South, and Vice-President of Harvard College, in a discourse on the death of Governor Leverett, declared that "men deal injuriously who confine their [rulers'] authority to matters only of the second table, unless we can say that Atheism, Heresy, Despising God's Ordinances

are no provoking sins,"-a doctrine still further endorsed in 1679, by a general synod of churches, assembled in Boston, in an Address to the General Court, on "The Necessity of Reformation," in which it was said: "Luther, Calvin, Zwinglius, and other reformers would have labored in vain, had not the princes and senators amongst whom they lived, promoted the interests of the Reformation;" that is, punished "heresy" with the sword of the magistrate.

In the Election Sermon of 1703, the second year of Queen Anne,

and seventy-five years after the landing of the Puritans, one of the greatest divines of New England, Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, reiterated the Puritan doctrine, that "rulers are to be keepers of both tables; . . . they must use all proper means for the suppression of Heresy, Profaneness, and Superstition, and other Corruptions in Worship."

In the Election Sermon of 1740, William Cooper, of Boston, admonished the General Court not to "forget" that they were "the Guardians of Religion," and that they "should employ their care and power for that [the church] in the first and chief place."

Nathaniel Eells, of Scituate, told the civil magistrates, in 1743, that they might "enact laws for the promoting and preserving the true Christian Religion," and "oblige men to submit to the laws of Christ, so far, at least, as to make no disturbance in the church."

The above will more than suffice to show the prevailing Puritan sentiment of Massachusetts, for nearly a hundred years from its first settlement. After reading these specimens of opinion, none can believe that the Puritans came over to New England to promote the cause of religious liberty. They made no such profession.

Let us now turn to the Separatists of England, whether we call them Brownists or Independents, and to the Pilgrims and their immediate descendants, to ascertain how far the above picture of the Massachusetts Colony applies to that of Plymouth.

In the year 1582, Robert Browne, the root from which the Pilgrims sprang, declared that "to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties, belongeth not to them [magistrates], neither yet to the church." This sounds very satisfactory, and is certainly wide asunder from Puritan doctrine. Yet, with a seemingly strange inconsistency, Browne believed that the civil magistrate had a right to interfere in behalf of a Scriptural religion. This, in fact, is the weak point in all the early Separatists. The truth ought to be protected by the civil arm.

Henry Barrow, who, with Greenwood and Penry, suffered martyrdom in 1593, held, in opposition to the Puritans, that the Church of England, as constituted under Elizabeth, was not the true Church of Christ. She was corrupt and persecuting. His tolerant spirit separates him also from the Puritans.

Deal tenderly, [he said], with tender consciences. . . . As for dungeons, irons, close prisons, torments, hunger, cold, want of means to maintain families,-these may cause some to make shipwreck of a good conscience, or to lose their life; but they are not fit ways to persuade