himself, but for the myriads living and to be born, of whom he assumes to be the pioneer and the champion.” (p. 301.) This large and unqualified claim might be advanced for the founders of Rhode Island, but it cannot be set up for the founders of Massachusetts.  Whoever asserts it for the latter commits himself most unnecessarily to an awkward and ineffective defence of them in a long series of restrictive and severe measures against “religious freedom,” beginning with the case of the Brownes at Salem, and including acts of general legislation as well as of continuous ecclesiastical and judicial proceeding.  Winthrop tells us that the aim of his brotherhood was “to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity here.”  The General Court repeatedly signified its desire to have a draft of laws prepared which might be “agreeable to the word of God.”  Now either of these statements of the ruling purpose of the colonists, as then universally understood and interpreted, was inconsistent with what we now understand by “freedom in religion,” or “liberty of conscience.”  What were regarded as “the pure ordinances of Christ” could not have been set up here, nor could such laws as were then considered as “agreeable to the word of God” have been enacted here, without impairing individual freedom in matters of religion.  Indeed, it was the very attempt to realize these objects which occasioned every interference with perfect liberty of conscience.  The fathers of Massachusetts avowed their purpose to be, not the opening of an asylum for all kinds of consciences, but the establishment of a Christian commonwealth.  Their consistency can be vindicated by following out their own idea, but not by assigning to them a larger one.

Mr. Arnold, as we have said, is more sharply guarded in his statement of the aim of the founders of the Bay Colony in this respect; and it is all the more remarkable that he does not give them the benefit of the recognized limitation.  He defines for them a restricted object, but he judges them by a standard before which they never measured themselves, and then condemns them for short-comings.  He tells us distinctly that the motives of the exiles “were certainly not those assigned them by Charles I., ‘the freedom of liberty of conscience’” (p. 10); that “they looked for a home in the New World where they might erect an establishment in accordance with their peculiar theological views.  ’They sought a faith’s pure shrine,’ based on what they held to be a purer system of worship, and a discipline more in unison with their notions of a church.  Here they proceeded to organize a state, whose civil code followed close on the track of the Mosaic Law, and whose ecclesiastical polity, like that of the Jews, and of all those [Christian governments?] then existing, was identified with the civil power.  They thus secured, what was denied them in England, the right to pursue their own form of religion without molestation, and in this the object of their exile