Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/151

Rh to religious concerns, and if not in Old England then in New England, or some other corner of the earth, they  would seek out their coveted rest. Toleration, to them, meant to be independent and undisturbed in the enjoyment  of their religious principles and prerogatives. As to letting others alone, whose presence and influence seemed to them  intolerant and to threaten their own quiet, was another  matter. The Boston Puritan had no use in the seventeenth century for a Baptist, a Quaker, a Churchman or a Catholic. The presence of either on Boston soil was a menace to the solidarity of Puritanism, in which he implicitly believed. What he regarded as errors in religion was also considered treason to the commonweathcommonwealth [sic].

Cotton Mather says, "It is also thought that the very Quakers themselves would say that if they had got into a  corner of the world, and with an immense toyle and change  made a wilderness habitable, on purpose there to be undisturbed in the exercise of their worship, they would never  bear to have New Englanders come among them and interrupt their public worship, endeavor to seduce their  children from it, yea and repeat such endeavors after  mild entreaties, first, and then banishment, to oblige their  departure."

On the 13th of November, 1644, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, John Endicott, governor, expressed its  ideas of the Anabaptists in such legislation as this:

"Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully and often proved that since the first arising of the Anabaptists, about  a hundred years since, they have been the incendiaries of  commonwealths, and the infectors of persons in main matters of religion, and the troublers of churches in all places  where they have been, and that they, who have held the  baptizing of infants unlawful, have usually held other errors  or heresies together therewith, though they have (as other  hereticks use to do) conceded the same, till they spied out a  fit advantage and opportunity to vent them by way of questions or scruple;  and whereas divers of this kind have, since