be no greater fallacy than the notion that they meant to establish a home for all the uneasy consciences that might flock here. But we are not prepared to accept Dr. Ellis's statement that they left England to get away from an unbridled liberty of conscience. "They had begun to see around them," he says, "in their native England, the threatenings of some of the effects and results of just what we mean by liberty of conscience, and they shuddered at them. Their dread of those consequences was one of the satisfactions which they afterwards found in their exile. It would be much nearer the truth, - indeed, it is the truth itself, - and it would be truer to all the facts of the case, to the integrity of history, and to the right use of terms which get changed in their import and burden, to say frankly and boldly, that our Fathers came here to get away from, to get rid of, such liberty of conscience, as to them a hateful, pernicious, and ruinous thing, sure to result in impiety and anarchy." While we entirely agree with Dr. Ellis, that the founders of the Massachusetts Colony had not a particle of sympathy with the licentiousness of opinions and beliefs which he describes, we do not believe that those wild notions had become so widely diffused in England at the time of the Great Emigration that the desire to escape from them was the chief or even a principal motive of our Fathers in leaving England. If we read their motives aright, it was to escape from the prelates, and not from Levellers and Fifthmonarchy men in embryo, that they came here. With this exception, we find but little in Dr. Ellis's lecture to which we cannot yield a hearty assent; and many of his propositions are stated with a clearness, precision, and force which leave nothing to be added or qualified by a subsequent writer. Such for instance is this statement of the purposes of the Fathers: "Their lofty and soul-enthralling aim - the condition and reward of all their severe sufferings and arduous efforts was the establishment and administration here of a religious and civil commonwealth, which should bear the same relation to the spirit and the letter of the whole Bible that the Jewish commonwealth bore to the law of Moses." It is precisely here that Dr. Ellis finds the key to all the various movements of our colonial history; and the whole policy of the founders, as he abundantly shows, was guided by this idea of establishing on these shores a Bible Commonwealth. That such an experiment as they aimed to try here must fail was inevitable. "To construct a commonwealth out of a Church, as the honored and noble Winthrop so frankly avowed it," says Dr. Ellis, "and to administer all civil affairs by church-members, - that was the intent of the founders of this colony." For this purpose it was essential that the whole community should be composed of men of as deep convictions and as incorruptible principles as the Fathers themselves, that they should be able to exclude all who were not of like opinions with themselves, and that they should be allowed undisturbed possession of the territory on which they meant to try their experiment; and they thought they had secured these conditions. Their charter gave them a perfect title to the soil. It gave them also the right to choose their own associates. It gave them the right to banish all who should attempt to annoy them in their work. But this was not enough. It is the tendency of all such enterprises to lose their hold on the hearts and minds of the younger members; doubt and indifference creep in; opposition arises from without; and the attempt to preserve or restore unity of opinion only increases the difficulty. This our Fathers found very early. As Dr. Ellis pointedly says, "They could not create a State out of a church; for a State grew up which would not come into their church, and which they would not have allowed to come into it. They could not administer a civil government by biblical statutes; for those statutes have God, not man, for their administrator. That liberty of conscience which they themselves, and for themselves, had put under restraining subjection to their own covenants and religious limitations, was irresistibly exercised by some among them, and by a continual succession of new-comers." How they treated these dissentients and intruders is a question only less important than the question as to their own aims and purposes; and its discussion very properly forms the subject of Dr. Ellis's second lecture, - the third of the course. After a brief restatement of some of the positions which he had advanced in his first lecture, respecting the dislike of the founders of Massachusetts for all special revelations and all eccentricities of opinion, followed by some remarks on the distinction which the authorities observed in their treatment of dissentients and of intruders, he proceeds to take up separately the cases of Roger Williams, of Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers, and of the Quakers. Each of these subjects is examined at length, and with marked fairness; though the treatment is not, on the whole, we think, quite so satisfactory as his discussion of similar matters in his first lecture. The account of Roger Williams, however, is especially candid and judicious, and is worthy of the more notice from the fact, that sympathy with Williams's principles and respect for his forgiving temper lead many persons to look only on the more attractive side of his character. If he was in many respects in advance of his contemporaries, and in his later years exhibited a rare magnanimity, we must not forget that he was of a very litigious disposition, and that it was impossible for other men to live at peace with him. It is true that he was young and impetuous when he first came here, and that much allowance must therefore be made for his errors at Salem and Plymouth. But age did little to chill his ardor and his love of controversy. His last publication was a controversial work against the Quakers, with the punning title, "George Fox digged out of his Burrowes"; and one of the last acts of his life was to row a boat from Providence to Newport, that he might hold a public disputation with three Quakers. He was, in fine, as Dr. Ellis remarks, precisely what he was called by John Quincy Adams, "a conscientious, contentious man"; and never having been admitted a freeman of the company, he was here only on sufferance. If he had been content to live here peaceably, and not have attacked the authority of the magistrates and vilipended the churches, he might have been one of the most honored and beloved of the colonists; but he had no gift of silence, and his banishment was merely the exercise by the magistrates of the right of self-defence against one whose continued VOL. LXXXVII. - NEW SERIES, VOL. VIII. NO. II. 12 presence here they regarded as a perpetual source of danger. It is well known that Dr. Ellis has made the early history of the Quakers the subject of special investigation; and in dealing with this branch of his subject he has illustrated his positions by numerous references to rare tracts and unpublished manuscripts. We cannot help thinking, however, that in his calm, careful, and candid balancing of the facts in the case, he has been too lenient in his judgment of these "intrusive, pestering, indecent, and railing disturbers" of the colony. There is no point in the early history of Massachusetts more clear than this, that the Quakers were the aggressors in their struggle with the lawful authorities of the colony, or, as Dr. Ellis well expresses it, that "they wantonly initiated the strife, and with a dogged pertinacity persisted in outrages which drove the authorities almost to frenzy; while with a stiff temper of audacity, as the authorities saw it, but of fidelity to holy duty, as they felt, they courted the extreme penalties which they might at any moment have escaped, except through constraint of their 'inspirations." They did not spring up within the colony, but they came hither unbidden, in the face of laws expressly prohibiting their entrance; and when sent away, under the authority of that provision of the charter which gave the company power to expel any person who should attempt to annoy the plantation or the inhabitants, they returned once and again, to pour out more scurrilous abuse on the church and the magistrates, and to indulge in more gross violations of decency. They were, indeed, ignorant, deluded, and self-willed men and women, whose heads were filled with crude notions, whose lips poured out foul-mouthed abuse on the leaders of the community into which they forced themselves, and whose conduct was such as no civilized society could tolerate for a moment. It is but a small palliation of their outrages against law and decency to say that their lives were pure; for their acts were such as people our houses of correction and lunatic asylums, and human laws deal not with motives, but with overt acts. As Dr. Ellis truly says, "Our Fathers cared little, if at all, for the Quaker theology. They did not get so far as that in dealing with them. Not being inclined to accept the account which the Quakers gave of themselves as being under the peculiar guidance of the Holy Spirit, our Fathers dealt with them on the score of their manners, their lawlessness, and their offensive speech and manners." That our Fathers were justified in enacting and enforcing the penalty of death as a punishment for coming back after banishment, no one at this day will maintain; but there was no defect in their title to the soil, and in expelling the Quakers they were simply doing what we do whenever we expel an intruder from our premises, either in town or country. In banishing or imprisoning, they were enforcing well-known laws, which they thought were necessary to the safety of the community, which were upheld by the public sentiment, and which cannot be regarded as disproportionate to the offences of the Quakers against public peace and public morality. Another subject about which a good deal of misrepresentation has gathered within a few years, is the history of slavery in Massachusetts, - how far it was legally established here, how it was regarded by the founders of the colony, and what was its character. For the thorough discussion of this much vexed question no one was so well qualified by previous research as Governor Washburn; and his exhaustive examination of it fully justifies his selection for the work. He has stated with singular clearness and force all the important facts and arguments bearing on the subject, and no one not persistently wedded to a different theory can withhold his assent to the conclusions here reached. That slavery existed in Massachusetts at a very early period is a fact of historical record; and that it was not a subject over which the colony could exercise much control is not less certain. "So far as negro slavery was concerned," says Governor Washburn, "their power to act at all was exceedingly circumscribed. They could prohibit neither the importation nor the sale of slaves without clashing at once with the interests and wishes of government at home." All that they could do was to regulate the status of the children of slaves born in the colony; and this they |