Among the leading actors or thinkers of the time there are three conspicuously honourable exceptions to the policy of conversion by extermination :-John Eliot, the "Apostle of the Indians," into whose language he translated a great portion of the Scriptures; his benevolent friend, Daniel Gookin, an immigrant from England through Virginia, originator of the claim, "no taxation without representation," the rumour of whose death, according to Mr. Tyler, “carried sorrow into every red man's wigwam in Massachusetts"; and Roger Williams. The last, as the finest figure of our early period, demands a brief notice in the most cursory sketch of its development; but to appreciate his moral and intellectual courage, we must revert to the forces with which he had to contend. Williams, says the historian Bancroft, was "the first in Christendom to assert, in its plenitude, the doctrine of Liberty of Conscience; he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor of Taylor." His prime claim to our respect is the fact that he asserted this doctrine under the most unfavourable circumstances; and was, in its defence, almost single-handed against the best as well as the worst of his compeers.

The strength and weakness alike of the seventeenth century Puritans, lay rooted in a Hebraic belief in their being a chosen people, sent on a divinely-guided crusade against error and sin in all the corners of the earth. The results of this conviction appear in sublime and in ludicrous aspects in the early records of New England. Many of the accounts of the perils and escapes of the early voyagers are written in the style and saturated with the sentiment of Bunyan passing through the Valley of the Shadow, as through his life, attended or beset by "legions of demons that lurk, armies of angels that soar." But the stamp of Bunyan's half insanity, as well as his inspiration, is on the pages of those warriorpreachers; and their special providences often degenerate into

REMARKABLE PROVIDENCES.

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almost blasphemous burlesque, e.g., Anthony Thacker, saved from shipwreek, narrates: "As I was sliding off the rock into the sea the Lord directed my toes into a joint in the rock's side, as also the tops of some of my fingers." Another zealot informs us that the mice in the cupboard, eating the Episcopal Prayer Book and leaving untouched the Psalms, converted him to Presbyterianism; another, that a barber of Boston, called to draw a tooth in Roxbury, was frozen to death on the way home, because he used, when at his work of hair-clipping, to argue against predestination; another, that a Harvard president was mysteriously cut short in his public prayer, after which the college was found to be on fire. Mather's Remarkable Providences are in great measure a record of infatuations similar to those of a later age so incomparably gibbeted by Sidney Smith. These are the grotesques of a superstition, the essence of which lay in an assumption of infallibility as absolute as, during the same period, with equal self-sacrifice and zeal, the Jesuit missionaries were inculcating in Canada among the Hurons. Such a belief, accompanied with the historically twin dogma, that our eternal destiny is dependent upon the accuracy of our theological views, is inconsistent with tolerance and ought to lead to persecution. A happy inconsistency, a humane faint-heartedness, has protected many ages and nations from their legitimate consequences; but the leaders of New England were neither faint-hearted nor humane, and they accepted these consequences as emphatically as Calvin did when, for the saving of souls, he burned Servetus. Their keymajor is struck in the following sentence of Edward Johnson:

"You are not to set up for tolerating times, nor shall any of you be content with this that you are set at liberty; but take up your arms and march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be abolished; and as for you who are called to sound forth His silver trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune for the armies of the great Jehovah are at hand."

Thomas Shepard, in the same spirit, declared that toleration was "Satan's policy;" and in his Cobbler of Agawam Nathaniel Ward, an accomplished Cambridge scholar, exiled by Laud, breaks out

"I dare take upon me to be the herald of New England so far as to proclaim to the world in the name of our colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free liberty -to keep away from us; and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better." And elsewhere, "Polypiety is the greatest impiety in the world. . . . To authorise an untruth by toleration of State is to batter God out of His chair. . . . He that is willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need hang God's Bible at the devil's girdle. . . . It is said that men ought to have liberty of their conscience, and that it is persecution to debar them of it. . . Let all the wits under the heavens lay their heads together and find an assertion worse than this, I will petition to be chosen the universal idiot of the world. . . . I desire all good men may be saved from their lunatic creed by infidelity. . . . Since I knew what to fear, my timorous heart hath dreaded three things: a blazing star appearing in the air; a State comet, I mean a favourite rising in a kingdom; a new opinion spreading in religion."

Considering how close a travesty these sentences convey of the sentiments of Laud himself, we are half inclined to suspect Mr. Ward of playing Mephistopheles, like Defoe in his "Short way with the Dissenters;" in gravity or mockery he has the merit of saying the strongest words in defence of a system of which, in the New World, he is the frankest advocate they are the natural outcome of the popular theology, of the hell painted so lovingly by Thomas Hooker, of the total depravity in the contemplation of which Thomas Shepard seems to revel, of the ponderous pages of terrible logic with which John Cotton used to "love to sweeten his mouth before he went to sleep." As far as the graver matters of the law were concerned, these saintly men were only singular in their sincerity, their contempt for half measures, and their power. The early history of New England being that of a Democratic Theocracy, there was no room for the

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intellectually fertile antagonism of Priest and Prophet: the persons and functions of the two, with many of the prerogatives of King, were combined. The Church being "free," in the sense of controlling the Legislature, the mass of the people were intellectually, and in many respects, legally, the slaves of the clergy. The pulpit was the high throne of State, the rostra, and the judgment seat; the sermons the only play. The religious services lasted commonly for five hours, and the whole population, over infancy, were compelled to attend them: they were driven in by elders deputed for the task, and the sexes herded apart, like oxen in pens. Boys who fell asleep were whipped, women tickled. Absence without excuse of "illness or other necessary cause" was punished first by a fine, then by the stocks. The week-day life of the people was regulated with like severity. To any one of a genial temperament, existence in those days must have been one of pains and penalties. Amusements were interdicted, and the most innocent recreations condemned. The Puritans, as Macaulay tells us, "hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." From the time when Endicott and Standish struck down the pretty "Maypole of Merry Mount" (which Mr. Hawthorne's genius has wreathed again), and called the place "Dagon," to that in which the rival interests of the Revolution set a limit to this tyranny, life in the New England of the "old colonial day" must have been more dismal than life in Cromwellian, almost in proportion as that was more dismal than life in Elizabethan England. The nearest parallel is to be found in Scotland during the later part of the same century, when, Mr. Buckle tells us, a mother was publicly censured for kissing her child on the Sabbath day. But at New Plymouth a maidservant who had smiled in church " I was threatened with banishment from the colony," and a woman who ventured to blame an elder "had a cleft-stick put on her tongue."

Laughter was frowned at-" How can you be merry?" said a gruff fellow to some harmless youngsters, "unless you are sure of your salvation;" the use of starch and tobacco regarded as criminal; "a solemn association" was " instituted" against long hair; and a lady who wore a fashionable dress, pronounced by a high cleric "fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than humoured."

What wonder that the ascetic zealots, who were kindled into a rage of gloom by the sight of a cheerful countenance, a coquettish curl, or a flowing dress, should have fined, scourged, branded, and banished from their Zion all Baptists, Quakers, and men of every shade of belief except their own. A heavy price, the risk of being hanged for a false premise or conclusion, had to be paid for holding acres rent free, owning no "superior," and dwelling on the edge of a new land in the midst of exciting alarms. To the fantasies logically consequent upon their creed they added others incident to their condition. People in peril are, with few exceptions, superstitious, and, despite their confident faith in a polestar Providence, these pioneers felt like sailors in a rough and unknown sea. They were in constant contact with novelties which predispose to credulity, and, breathing the same electric atmosphere that has so materially conduced to modern Spiritualism, they were often in a state of body, as well as of mind, ready to be impressed by marvels, or imposed upon by hallucinations. The natural outlets

being stopped, their pent up enthusiasm found vent in the most physically dangerous over - excitement that called religious. One saint's prayers, we are told, "were so fervent, that he bled at the nose through the agony with which he laboured at them ;" and we can imagine that the same perverted overstrain developed many incipient Puritan Saint Theresas, of whom the latest types are to be found probably at Oneida Creek. Never was the verse of Joel more verified—