Atlantic Monthly | Page 9

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. Moreover, their worst penalties were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.
Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed, the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the resolution, the Puritan historian says, so far as going into the Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the medi?val laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with a zeal of God against sin, according to their best