If Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, whose views and opinions were comparatively calm and conventional, called forth the vehemence of reprobation from the churches of Massachusetts, what mercy or forbearance could be expected for the fanatical, early Quakers, whose zeal almost approached to insanity? None.
In July, 1656, two quaker preachers, whose names, to use their own phraseology, “according to the flesh,” were Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, arrived at Boston. No law as yet existed against the Quakers; but under the statutes of heresy their trunks were searched, and “though no token could be found on them, but of innocence,” their books were burned by the hangman and their persons examined for signs of witchcraft. After five weeks’ close imprisonment, they were thrust out of the colony; together with eight others who arrived during the year. Mary Fisher, nothing daunted by her reception among the Christians, turned her views toward the Turks, and proceeded alone to Adrianople, where she delivered to the grand Sultan the message which she believed entrusted to her by heaven. The Turks, more Christian than the New England Christians, deemed her insane, and she went through their army “without hurt or scoff.”
A law was now passed forbidding the entrance of Quakers into the colony; but such a law rather invited than deterred men and women who, believing themselves the especial messengers of God, feared neither the power nor the wrath of the arm of flesh. The Quakers came, and the horrors of persecution began in earnest. One woman, who had come to London purposely to warn the magistrates against persecution, was whipped with twenty stripes. Some who had been banished, returned only to be imprisoned, fined, whipped and sent away under penalty of severe punishment if they returned; a fine of forty shillings was imposed for every hour’s entertainment of any “of the accursed sect,” and a Quaker, if a man, after the first conviction was to lose one ear, after the second the other, and after the third, his tongue was to be bored with a red-hot iron. If a woman, she was to be whipped with stripes proportioned to the repetition of the offence. Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven adopted similar laws. The colony, however, was soon ashamed of the statute of mutilation, and it was repealed; but, as was sure to be the case, New England was soon all the more actively visited by Quakers. The following year, therefore, by the advice of the commissioners of the united colonies, the younger Winthrop alone dissenting, a law was passed banishing them on pain of death. In the province of Rhode Island alone were the Quakers safe, favoured by the great principle of toleration. Again and again the united colonies remonstrated on the privileges which they here enjoyed, and in reply to one of their remonstrances, the more sensible Rhode Islanders said, “in those places where these people are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are openly opposed by argument in discourse, they least desire to come, so that they begin to loathe this place for that they are not opposed by the civil authority, but with all patience and meekness are suffered to say over their pretended revelations.” But Massachusetts could neither see nor understand the policy of forbearance; the very fines imposed on those who attended their meetings acted only as a whet to curiosity; and spite of finings, whippings, brandings and cropping of ears, the Quakers came and came again, and Boston of all places, the laws there being the severest, was the most attractive to them.
In October, 1659, under the law which made it a capital offence for a Quaker to return to the colony, Marmaduke Stevenson of Yorkshire, who related of himself that, while he was at plough at Skipton, a voice called to him saying, “I have ordained thee to be a prophet to the nations;” William Robinson of London, who had already been whipped, and Mary Dyer, the widow of the late recorder of Providence, and a friend of Anne Hutchinson, were all found guilty of “rebellion, sedition, and presumptuously obtruding themselves into the colony after banishment on pain of death.” Mary Dyer was carried to the gallows with the rope round her neck, where she witnessed the execution of her friends, after which she was reprieved; but the reprieve was hardly welcome; “Let me suffer as my brethren,” said she, “unless you will annul your wicked law!” The government of Massachusetts, in excuse for these extreme measures, asserted, that “they sought not the death but the absence of the Quakers;” and when, some months later, Mary Dyer, “impelled,” as she said, “by the Spirit,” returned to testify against “the bloody town of Boston,” they thought it necessary to vindicate their authority by hanging her as they had done the others.
Vain were all these barbarities to put down quakerism, or to keep “the accursed sect” out of the puritan borders; for as Wendlock Christopherson, who having returned in defiance of the sentence of death, now standing face to face with his stern and pitiless judges, said: “for the last man that was put to death there are five come in his room; and if you have power to take my life from me, God can raise up the same principle of life in ten of his servants, and send them among you in my room, that you may have torment upon torment.” Whether it was the fear of this Hydra-headed quakerism, or whether God prevented them from taking his life, he too was reprieved after sentence of death, and finally set at liberty. Little mercy, however, prevailed generally; the prisons were full of Quakers, men, women, and even children, as in the case of Patience Scott, a girl of eleven, and the hangman’s whip seemed never to have done its work. At length the compassion of the people generally was so much excited, that night and day such crowds gathered round the prison to condole with and to hear the Quakers, who preached through the bars, that a guard was placed round its walls to keep the people off.
The last Quaker that suffered death was William Ledra; he too had returned after sentence of banishment; and being again offered his life, on condition of his leaving the country, replied that he was willing to die; and, accordingly, in March 1660, he was executed. Imprisonment went on, and whipping at the cart’s-tail began, but the poor Quakers were as determined as ever; and in proportion as the magistrates were more cruel, they became more infatuated. Strange that the rulers did not see that the one excess was the result of the other! They entered the congregations during the time of worship, and denounced the preaching to be an abomination to the Lord. They went through the streets crying out that the day of the Lord’s vengeance was at hand; and one woman even, otherwise decorous, forgot the natural modesty and self-respect of her sex so far as to appear naked in the streets. To what extent this mad zeal might have gone on the one hand, and the bigotry of punishment and persecution on the other, there is no saying. But the one died gradually and naturally away, when the other ceased, in consequence of an order from Charles II. in 1661, the report of these atrocities having reached England, when it was ordered that a stop should be put to all capital or corporeal punishment of the people called “Quakers.”
While persecution was thus outraging the spirit of Christianity, a noble apostle of Christ was labouring in the divine spirit of his Great Master, and to him we will now turn, glad to leave so hideous an aspect of religion for another beautiful in the love of Christ. We refer to John Eliot, the missionary of the Indians.
The first colonists hoped to have incorporated the Indians into their own commonwealth, and their charters provided for assignments of land to any such Indians as might become civilised. The pilgrims entertained the wish to Christianise the natives. “Alas!” said the good Robinson, when he heard of the first slaughter of the Indians, “that you had not converted some before you killed any!” Unfortunately, however, the Puritans, as we have said, regarding themselves as typified by the chosen Israelites, soon began to regard the natives as equally typified by the native tribes of Canaan; and a spirit of pride taking place of the former spirit of love, it was suggested “that the Indians might be, naturally as well as figuratively, the children of the devil,” and by degrees, they were treated as such with contempt and abhorrence. Before, however, this evil fruit loaded a once goodly tree, John Eliot, the minister of Roxbury, distinguished himself by his Christian labours among these children of the wilderness. Eliot began to preach to the Indians in 1646, when he was about forty years of age. “His benevolence,” says Bancroft, “almost amounted to genius. An Indian grammar was a pledge of his earnestness; the pledge was redeemed by his preparing and publishing a translation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts dialect. His actions, his thoughts, his desires, all wore the hues of disinterested love.
JOHN ELIOT PREACHING TO THE INDIANS.