with the partial reformation, at which, as they conceived, the
English establishment had rested; and claiming the privilege of
private conscience, upon which alone any departure from the Church
of Rome could be justified, they insisted upon the right of adhering
to the system of their own preference, and, of course, upon that of
nonconformity to the establishment prescribed by the royal
authority. The only means used to convince them of error and
reclaim them from dissent was force, and force served but to confirm
the opposition it was meant to suppress. By driving the founders of
the Plymouth Colony into exile, it constrained them to absolute
separation from the Church of England; and by the refusal afterwards
to allow them a positive toleration, even in this American
wilderness, the council of James I. rendered that separation
irreconcilable. Viewing their religious liberties here, as held
only by sufferance, yet bound to them by all the ties of conviction,
and by all their sufferings for them, could they forbear to look
upon every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye? Within
two years after their landing, they beheld a rival settlement
attempted in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the
laws of self-preservation compelled them to break up a nest of
revelers, who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who
had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding their
wanton idleness, by furnishing the savages with the means, the
skill, and the instruments of European destruction. Toleration, in
that instance, would have been self-murder, and many other examples
might be alleged, in which their necessary measures of self-defense
have been exaggerated into cruelty, and their most indispensable
precautions distorted into persecution. Yet shall we not pretend
that they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or entirely
free from all the errors of their age. Their zeal might sometimes