One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties severe,—­and it certainly was so.  Looking at their educational provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a day.  Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal.  Roger Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts.  But the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to death, if they “cursed their orderly parents” after the age of sixteen;—­not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the statute-book.  Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with murder,—­though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service, at Geneva.  Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate.  Then the stocks and the wooden cage were in frequent use, though “barbarous and cruel” punishments were forbidden in 1641.  Scolds and railers were set on a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running water, if possible.  Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced with a cleft stick applied to her tongue.  Thomas Scott, in 1649, was sentenced for some offence to learn “the chatachise,” or be fined ten shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine.  Sometimes offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to “go and talk to the elders.”  And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned.  A new etymology for the word “courting.”

An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the ministers to the Indian wars.  Roger Williams, even when banished and powerless, could keep the peace with the natives.  But when the brave Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty, they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally referred to five “elders,” Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him in cold blood.  The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated, and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard, was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and one of his hands sent to Boston:  then the ministers returned thanks, and one said that they had prayed the bullet into Philip’s heart.  Nay, it seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, “the women, as they came out of the meeting-house,