We quote further from John Bolles:—
And as he (John Rogers) saith hitherto, so may we say now, fathers taken from their wives and children, without any regard to distance of place, or length of time. Sometimes fathers and mothers both taken and kept in prison, leaving their fatherless and motherless children to go mourning about the streets.
When a poor man hath had but one milch cow for his family’s comfort, it hath been taken away; or when he hath had only a small beast to kill for his family, it hath been taken from him, to answer a fine for going to a meeting of our own society, or to defray the charges of a cruel whipping for going to such a meeting, or things of this nature. Yea, £12 or £14 worth of estate hath been taken to defray the charges of one such whipping, without making any return as the law directs. And this latter clause in the law is seldom attended.
Yea, fourscore and odd sheep have been taken from a man, being all his flock; a team taken from the plough, with all its furniture, and led away. But I am not now about giving a particular account; for it would contain a book of a large volume to relate all that hath been taken from us, and as unreasonable and boundless as these.
Mr. McEwen says derisively:—
Their goods were distrained; their cattle were sold at the post, and some of their people were imprisoned. But, emulating the example of the apostles, they took joyfully the spoiling of their goods; yea, they gloried in bonds and imprisonment.
It was not the apostles, but the Hebrews, to whom the apostle wrote, who took joyfully the spoiling of their goods. A small matter, it may seem, to correct; but accuracy of Scripture quotation may be a Rogerene trait, and the writer will be proud if it be said, “Surely, thou art also one of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.”
The subject on which we have entered opens and broadens and deepens before us, blending with all history and all truth. It is not exceptional, it is not isolated. It may not be blotted from memory, as it cannot be blotted from existence, painfully interwoven as it is with the mottled fabric of time. The world’s greatest benefactors have often been its greatest sufferers. Socrates was made to drink the fatal hemlock, for not believing in the gods acknowledged by the state. Seneca, the moralist, was put to death by his ungrateful pupil, Nero. The first followers of Christ were persecuted, tortured and slain by the heathen world. Attaining to civil power, Christians treated in like manner their fellow Christians. Ecclesiastical history, wherever there has been an alliance of church and state, is blackened with crimes and cruelties too foul to be named. Recall the nameless horrors of the Inquisition, perpetrated under such rule. Think of Smithfield and the bloody queen.
Is it to be wondered at that the Rogerenes, meeting persecution at every turn, should have been aroused to a sublimity of courage, perhaps of defiance, against the tide of intolerance which had swept over the ages and was now wildly dashing its unspent waves across their path? Not until more than a century later did the potent word of Christian enlightenment go forth, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.”
Passing a period of fifty years, darkened with wrongs and cruelties, the following notice of whipping is here given. It is necessary to present facts, that we may form a true judgment of the character and mission of this sect, which had at least the honor, like that of the early Christians, of being “everywhere spoken against.”