all who favored the reformation, many of the most zealous reformers had been compelled to fly their country.  While residing on the continent of Europe, they had adopted the principles of the most complete and rigorous reformation, as taught and established by Calvin.  On returning afterwards to their native country, they were dissatisfied with the partial reformation, at which, as they conceived, the English establishment had rested; and claiming the privilege of private conscience, upon which alone any departure from the Church of Rome could be justified, they insisted upon the right of adhering to the system of their own preference, and, of course, upon that of nonconformity to the establishment prescribed by the royal authority.  The only means used to convince them of error and reclaim them from dissent was force, and force served but to confirm the opposition it was meant to suppress.  By driving the founders of the Plymouth Colony into exile, it constrained them to absolute separation from the Church of England; and by the refusal afterwards to allow them a positive toleration, even in this American wilderness, the council of James I. rendered that separation irreconcilable.  Viewing their religious liberties here, as held only by sufferance, yet bound to them by all the ties of conviction, and by all their sufferings for them, could they forbear to look upon every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye?  Within two years after their landing, they beheld a rival settlement attempted in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the laws of self-preservation compelled them to break up a nest of revelers, who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding their wanton idleness, by furnishing the savages with the means, the skill, and the instruments of European destruction.  Toleration, in that instance, would have been self-murder, and many other examples might be alleged, in which their necessary measures of self-defense have been exaggerated into cruelty, and their most indispensable precautions distorted into persecution.  Yet shall we not pretend that they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or entirely free from all the errors of their age.  Their zeal might sometimes be too ardent, but it was always sincere.  At this day, religious indulgence is one of our clearest duties, because it is one of our undisputed rights.  While we rejoice that the principles of genuine Christianity have so far triumphed over the prejudices of a former generation, let us fervently hope for the day when it will prove equally victorious over the malignant passions of our own.