Puritan divines might do without rebuke.  Not one of them has left on record a statement so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:—­“To be content with food and raiment,—­to mind, not our own, but every man the things of another,—­yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of God’s sake,—­this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish blasphemy against the Christian religion.”  And yet the mind of Roger Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?

These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held evil,—­Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians, negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and women in slash apparel.  Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience.  Some of them would never chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on the death of some beloved child.  That identical “Priest Wilson” who made the ballad at Mary Dyer’s execution attended a military muster one day.  “Sir,” said some one, “I’ll tell you a great thing:  here’s a mighty body of people, and there’s not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson.”  “Sir,” it was replied, “I’ll tell you as good a thing:  here’s a mighty body of people, and there’s not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves him.”  Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men came along from a tavern and said, “Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,” and one came and cried in his ear, “Cotton, thou art an old fool,”—­“I know it, I know it,” retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently added, “The Lord make both me and thee wiser!” Mr. Hooker was once reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, “I see you are in a passion; I will not answer you,” and so ran away.  It contradicts all one’s notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man, finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.

What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since supplied the tonic for a continent?  It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he was “a person who, while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket”; and it was so with them all:  they would pocket anything but a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession.  They flinched from no reproof that was needed: