NOTE A.
Nothing could well be more uncandid than the representations of a certain class of writers in their attempts to disparage the Fathers of New England. It is not wonderful that some errors of past ages and of their own age were still revealed in them. It is not strange that having left their native land and endured all sacrifices for the sake of enjoying their own opinions unmolested, they should have been sensitive to the intrusion of new elements of strife. That they misjudged and acted wrongly in some particulars is readily to be admitted. But that even their faults "leaned to virtue's side" only ill-nature and prejudice can deny.
"It was in self-defence," says the historian Bancroft, (History United States, p. 463) "that Puritanism in America began those transient persecutions of which the excesses shall find in me no apologist; and which yet were no more than a train of mists hovering, of an autumn morning, over a fine river, that diffused freshness and vitality wherever it wound. The people did not attempt to convert others, but to protect themselves. They never punished opinion as such; they never attempted to punish or terrify men into orthodoxy. The history of religious persecution in New England
