Hope, Faith, and Charity remain—these three;
And greatest of them all is Charity.”
Longfellow, New England Tragedies, Prologue to “Endicott.”
We owe to their heroic devotion the most priceless of our treasures, our perfect liberty of thought and speech; and all who love our country’s freedom may well reverence the memory of those martyred Quakers, by whose death and agony the battle in New England has been won.
Brooke Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts.
Fierce and cruel as was the persecution in England it was far exceeded by the tortures which awaited the first Quaker missionaries in the New World. Barely fifty years earlier the Pilgrim Fathers had left the homeland and gone forth into an unknown wilderness, there to establish freedom of worship; their descendants, by bitter persecution of the Quakers, demonstrated their failure—in spite of their own sufferings—to learn the lesson of religious toleration. The general attitude of those in authority in the Colonies is very well pourtrayed in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Ward, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1645: “It is said that men ought to have liberty of conscience and that it is persecution to debar them of it. I can rather stand amazed than reply to this. It is an astonishment that the brains of a man should be parboiled in such impious ignorance”; and, further, John Callender, writing in 1739, said that in 1637 “the true Grounds of Liberty of Conscience were not then known or embraced by any Sect or Party of Christians.”[37]
The early history of the New England Colony shows that, some years before the advent of the Quakers, religious differences had arisen amongst the Colonists, and a certain section of the community had not escaped persecution. Anne Hutchinson, a brave and intrepid woman, had boldly protested against what might almost be termed a purely theological religion and the extreme power which was of necessity vested in the priest, which was the basis of the Puritan faith. Dr. Rufus Jones states the differing points of view very clearly:[38]
The real issue, as I see it in the fragments that are preserved, was an issue between what we nowadays call “religion of the first-hand type,” and “religion of the second-hand type,” that is to say, a religion on the one hand which insists on “knowledge of acquaintance” through immediate experience, and a religion on the other hand which magnifies the importance and sufficiency of “knowledge about.”
Anne Hutchinson was arraigned before a General Court of all the ministers, held in Boston in 1637. She defended herself with great ability, but without avail, in fact it is very possible that such unusual temerity on the part of a woman may have been largely responsible for the severity of the sentence passed upon her, for she was condemned to banishment and declared excommunicate. As the exiled outcast woman passed sadly down the aisle, one Mary Dyer[39] joined her and went forth with her, thus taking the first step on that path of suffering which led, twenty-three years later, to the gallows on Boston Common. Anne Hutchinson, after sentence of exile had been pronounced, joined her friends. She had a very considerable following in the new Colony of Aquiday, or Aquidneck, now called Rhode Island, which later became for the persecuted Quakers a veritable “little Zoar,”[40] for these early settlers learned the lesson of religious toleration which was reflected in their laws.[41]