Sober, earnest,
and thoughtful men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis, no realization of
a splendid dream, which they had at heart, but the establishment of the
divine principle of Authority on the common interest and the common
consent; the making, by a contribution from the free-will of all, a power
which should curb and guide the free-will of each for the general good.
If they were stern in their dealings with sectaries, it should be
remembered that the Colony was in fact the private property of the
Massachusetts Company, that unity was essential to its success, and that
John of Leyden had taught them how unendurable by the nostrils of honest
men is the corruption of the right of private judgment in the evil and
selfish hearts of men when no thorough mental training has developed the
understanding and given the judgment its needful means of comparison and
correction. They knew that liberty in the hands of feeble-minded and
unreasoning persons (and all the worse if they are honest) means nothing
more than the supremacy of their particular form of imbecility; means
nothing less, therefore, than downright chaos, a Bedlam-chaos of
monomaniacs and bores. What was to be done with men and women, who bore
conclusive witness to the fall of man by insisting on walking up the
broad-aisle of the meeting-house in a costume which that event had put
forever out of fashion! About their treatment of witches, too, there has
been a great deal of ignorant babble.
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