It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and have no tithingman to take his part.  But however it may be with the regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies.  Eighty-two “pestilent heresies” were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten.  The Puritans kept Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an “odd drawer,” into which to crowd all these eccentricities.  It was said, that, if any man happened to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island.  Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.  Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the ordinances.  The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday.  All these, and such as these, were called generally “Seekers” by the Puritans,—­who claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought.  It is the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to be at anchor?

Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with the leadership of the New-England colonies,—­Cotton, Hooker, Norton, Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers.  To these might be added many an obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the “Magnalia":—­Blackman, “in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than snow";—­Partridge, “a hunted partridge,” yet “both a dove and an eagle";—­Ezekiel Rogers, “a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very children might pluck";—­Nathaniel Rogers, “a very lively preacher and a very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family and he taught his family as if it had been his church";—­Warham, the first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt respecting the Lord’s Supper;—­Stone, “both a loadstone and a flint stone,” and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one hour.

These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,—­nobler than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others.  The most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,—­which