Mr. Neal adds the following just and impressive remarks: "_Thus the Government of New England, for the sake of uniformity in divine worship, broke in upon the natural rights of mankind, punishing men, not for disturbing the State, but for their different sentiments in religion_, as appears by the following Law:" [Then Mr. Neal quotes the law passed against the Baptists seven years before, in 1644, and given on page 92.] (Neal's History of New England, Vol. I., pp. 299, 300, 302, 303.)]
[Footnote 106: Hutchinson's Collection of State Papers, etc., pp. 401, 402.
Mr. Cotton wrote a long letter in reply to Sir R. Saltonstall, denying that he or Mr. Wilson had instigated the complaints against the Baptists, yet representing them as _profane_ because they did not attend the established worship, though they worshipped God in their own way. Cotton, assuming that the Baptist worship was no worship, and that the only lawful worship was the Congregational, proceeds to defend compulsory attendance at the established worship upon the ground of preventing Sabbath profaneness (which was a perversion of Sir R. Saltonstall's letter), the same as compulsory attendance at the established worship was justified in the time of Elizabeth and James the First, and against which the whole army of Puritan writers had contended. Some of Cotton's words were as follows: "But (you say) it doth make men hypocrites to compel men to conforme the outward men for fear of punishment. If it did so, yet better be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give God part of his due, the outward man; but the profane person giveth God neither the outward or inward man."--"If the magistrate connive at his absenting himself from the Sabbath duties, the sin will be greater in the magistrate than can be the other's coming."
Mr. Hutchinson, referring to Sir R. Saltonstall's letter, says:--"It discovers a good deal of that catholic spirit which too many of our first settlers were destitute of, and confirms what I have said of Mr. Dudley's zeal in the first volume of the Massachusetts History."]
[Footnote 107: History of the United States, Vol. I., p. 484.
"I believe," says Mr. Bancroft, "that the elder Winthrop had relented before his death, and, it is said, became weary of banishing heretics. The soul of the younger Winthrop was incapable of harbouring a thought of intolerant cruelty; but the rugged Dudley was not mellowed by old age." Cotton affirmed: "Better tolerate hypocrites and tares than thorns and briers." "Religion," said Norton, from the pulpit, "admits of no eccentric motions." (_Ib._, pp. 486, 487.)]