It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow wormy.  It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on, the Quakers called it a retribution for these things.  But let us be just, even to the unjust.  Toleration was a new-born virtue in those days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or asked to have exercised toward himself.  In England they did not wish to be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as the one true church.  They held with Pym, that “it is the duty of legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,”—­a doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or the wrong.  They objected to the Church of England, not that it persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed.  It is, therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised intolerance.  They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely blamed.  What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their largeness.  They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims of others, but their own.  They said to the Quakers, “We seek not your death, but your absence.”  All their persecution, after all, was an alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of their settlements and let them alone.  Moreover, their worst penalties were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to death from the beginning;—­of course, four too many.

Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not theological only, but political and social also.  Everything that the Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms.  With the best possible intentions, they subverted all established order.  Then their modes of action were very often intemperate and violent.  One can hardly approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that would rend any other man.  But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the Rareys.  Running naked through the public streets,—­coming into meeting dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their feet,—­or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men:  these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body.  The Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them.  Indeed, the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,—­playing over again upon George Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and imprisonment from which they had just escaped;—­as minorities have persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.