136 EXECUTION OF QUAKERS. in his New England Judged, has left it on record that three Quaker men had each his right ear cut off; *that "Patience Scott, a girl eleven years old, was imprisoned for Quaker principles; and that, when her mother, Catherine Scott, reproved them for a deed of darkness, they whipped her ten stripes, though they allowed her to be otherwise of a blameless conversation and well-bred, being an English clergyman's daughter." † The death, by hanging, of three Quaker men and one Quaker woman, executed because, after banishment, they returned to the colony, is well known. They died with eminent fortitude, willing martyrs to freedom of conscience, on Boston Common.† Some of the terms of Puritan indictment, against men thus tried for their lives, sound strangely to-day. It was charged against William Leddra that he "had refused to take off his hat in court, and would say thee and thou." "Will you put me to death,” he asked, "for speaking good not putting off my clothes?" § English and for The poor excuse made by their executioners was a declaration, spread on the records of the Court, that "they desired their lives absent rather than their deaths present." The apology usually offered to-day for these legal killings is that the Quakers who landed at Boston were disturbers of public peace and decency, as well as heretics. But their principles were emphatically of peace, simplicity, and non-resistance: nor is it true that they made any disturbance whatever until some of their property had been destroyed and their personal liberty * Their names were Holder, Copeland, and Rous. † Quoted by Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts, vol. i. p. 184. Executed October 27, 1659. + Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, Mary Dyar, William Leddra, Four only, be it borne in mind; and we have no list of the five thousand whom Torquemada handed over to the flames: but Torquemada never talked about liberty, civil or religious. § CHANDLER: American Criminal Trials; Little & Brown, Boston, 1841 vol. i. p. 46. EFFECTS OF LEGAL BRUTALITY. 137 violated. The first two Quakers who set foot in the colony, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, were seized on shipboard, their books burnt by the hangman, they themselves closely impris oned for five weeks and then thrust out of the colony. * Dur. ing the same year eight others were sent back to England. These (and far worse) infractions of the freedom of the * They arrived in July, 1656. It was a crime to afford them hospitality, or even to direct them on their way. In 1660, at one court, seven or eight persons were fined as high as ten pounds for entertaining Quakers; and Edward Wharton, for piloting them from one place to another, was whipped twenty stripes and bound over for his good behavior. See, for particulars of these and other persecutions of this sect, Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts, vol. i. pp. 180 to 189. In the legal records of these days we find darker shades. In 1662, three women, Anne Colman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose (convicted under the law against "vagabond Quakers") were sentenced to be tied to a cart's tail, stripped from the waist up and whipped, with ten stripes in each town, through eleven towns, to wit, Dover, Hampton, Salisbury, Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Wenham, Lynn, Boston, Roxbury, and Dedham-a hundred and ten stripes, in all, "One of the nipples of Anne Colman's breast was split by the knots of the whip, causing extreme torture." (Criminal Trials, already quoted, vol. i. p. 54.) This was in the dead of a New-England winter, the warrant bearing date December 22, 1662. No wonder that warrant was eventually executed in three towns only; the humanity of public sentiment rising in protest against legal brutality. One reads with more sorrow than surprise some of the extravagances which followed these indecent cruelties. In 1665 Lydia Wardell, a respectable married woman, entered stark naked into the church in Newbury, where she formerly worshipped, "and was highly extolled for her submission to the inward light that had revealed to her the duty of thus illustrating the spiritual nakedness of her neighbors." In the same year, Deborah Wilson, a young married woman of unblemished character, made a similar display in the streets of Salem, for which she was condemned to be stripped from the waist upward, tied to a cart's tail, and whipped.—Criminal Trials, vol. i. pp. 54, 55. How fervid, in those mistaught old times, the zeal among persecutors and persecuted alike! Now that we have knowledge to guide it, how has the fervor died out! 138 ROGER WILLIAMS BANISHED. citizen, preceded the clamorous testimony borne by Quakers against colonial rule. The Calvinism of those days forbade even to tolerate tolera tion. The bravest champion of man's right to worship God as conscience bids-the noblest apostle of soul-freedom among them all * was compelled to flee the colony under cloud of wintry night; owed his life to heathen hospitality; and when this future lawgiver of Rhode Island embarked at last to found a settlement where God alone should be judge of human relig ions, it was in an Indian canoe, with five followers only. Yet the offence for which Roger Williams was banished the jurisdiction, † was not that his own creed was heretical, but that he was guilty of granting to others the same right to choose a creed which he claimed for himself. Little more than a century after this America had a Constitution in which all laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, were forbidden. So fast, despite dwarfing creeds, grows the spirit of man in a new and a free country. Other Calvinisms, too, we have outgrown. The counterpart of laws under which children were beheaded in Geneva, are found on the records of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. "If any child or children above sixteen years old, and of sufficient understanding, shall curse or smite their natural father or mother, he or they shall be put to death:" the only exception being unless it shall be proved that the parents * I scarcely remember a parallel case, except one-among the Hindoos. A Brahmin once suffered martyrdom under a Mussulman prince, for preaching the doctrine of his sect, that "all religions if sincerely practised, are acceptable to God." "In the whole annals of suffering for righteousness' sake," says the narrator, "I know of no martyrdom more glorious than this."-BRUCE: Scenes and Lights in the East. † A warrant enforcing his banishment to England had issued against nim (January, 1636) at the time he fled from Salem, and wandered for three winter months, "not knowing what bread or bed did mean,” er, he reached the friendly cabin of Massasoit, chief of Pocanoket. LAWS AGAINST REBELLIOUS CHILDREN. 139 'have been very unchristianly negligent in the education of such children," or else that the children "have been forced thereunto to preserve themselves from death or maiming.” This refers to both sexes: the next section applies to boys only: "If any man have a stubborn or rebellious son of sufficient years of understanding (viz.), sixteen years of age, which will not obey the voice of his father nor the voice of his mother, and that when they have chastised him he would not hearken unto them," the parents shall bring him before the magistrates, and testify that he is stubborn and rebellious, and "such a son shall be put to death." * A girl of sixteen, because she struck her mother—a boy of that age, if denounced to the magistrates by his parents on the general charge that he was stubborn and rebellious-was to be hanged! And this, in our own country, little more than two hundred years ago! That no executions took place under this law, or under the clause of the other law according to which a denial that the Bible was infallible became a capital offence-is due to this, that the Puritans were men before they were Calvinists, and that their hearts were more merciful than their doctrines. None the less, the theocracy of the first two New England colonies, patterned after that of Geneva, was a despotism, fatal to progress. Fatal-because it was founded on the ancient, mischievous error of retributive justice: an error of which the tendency is to retard the moral advance of the world. Take any great social reform that now enlists philanthropic zeal, whether of law, or education, or prison discipline-whether in lunatic asylums or in temperance labors, or in the struggle against the great sin of great cities-take any such enlightened movement that is made in our inodern day, to civilize mankind * Laws cited; pp. 59, 60. The date is A.D. 1646. The laws of New Plymouth had the same two sections for the capital punishment of children cursing or striking parents, and of disobedient sons.-Laws of Plymouth Colony, p. 245. 140 THE WORLD'S DEBT TO THE REFORMERS. -look into its organization, and ask its conductors what is its governing principle: you will learn that it is based on the belief that man's better nature can be confidently appealed to; that love is stronger than fear, and gentle influences more humanizing than penal rigors. This accords with Christ's religion; but it runs directly counter to the Genevese theology. When reforms, thus administered, are carried out, it is done despite the chilling and deadening tendencies of Calvinism. The world owes the Reformers a vast debt, but not for their theology. It owes it Because they maintained that the succession of ecclesiarchs who, for a thousand years, had ruled the Christian world from Rome, were not infallible. Because they exposed many corruptions which had crept into the Church over which these ecclesiarchs presided. Because they denied the merit, and the saving power, of many empty ceremonials; of ascetical austerities, of monkish seclusions; of fasts, pilgrimages, celibate vows; and of pardons said to be of God, yet purchased with silver and gold. And, generally, because they shook, to its foundation, an ancient system of ecclesiastical rule which debarred religious progress, which habitually employed religious persecution, and which, as a whole, had outlived its utility. But we owe them far more than this. The inestimable boon which the Reformers bestowed on mankind was the disenthrallment of the Christian Record, till their day locked up in the Latin of the Vulgate; and, even in that secluded form, prohibited, as we have seen, by express canon, to all but the priesthood. Their theology will die out, but the results of that great gift will endure forever. The gift will finally prove an antidote to the theology.* * I would not be understood as denying that the theology, though it ran much closer to downright Antinomianism than Catholicism ever did, was yet, in its day, a certain progress. Luther as theologian, for exam |