But worthless as Mather’s statements are, in describing the views of the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded.  In accusing them of rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on record a general belief which he shared.  Nor can it be doubted that the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct.  In those days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and unseemly vagaries.  When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed them, with the remark, “Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces”; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct “testifying before the Lord”; we can hardly wonder that people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote:  Violent manifestations of dissent]

Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward explaining it.  Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill.  Their mere coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion.  It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea.  Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive.  There were at one time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the earth.  Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican.  In this dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman.  At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston.  When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion.  He arrested the two women and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their heresies to the crowd gathered