452 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [1803 



violence and robberies on its way to Philadelphia, left such horrid 

 impressions even in Maryland, the adjoining State to Pennsyl- 

 vania — that it would not have been wise to consecrate for the 

 Bishop of Maryland any man who had not been notoriously in 

 sympathy ^ith the popular cause. Bishop Provoost had hardly 

 any other special title to being selected for New York but that he 

 had been a warm Whig, and had borne arms against the British 

 invaders: and the influence even of the admirable Bishop White 

 was without doubt much increased in a republican community by 

 the fact that he had been a chaplain in the Congress of 1776, and 

 from the first a friend of Washington and a supporter of the 

 American cause. 



3. A bishop, it is declared, must be "no striker." My ancestor, 

 some persons thought, did not satisfy this requisition. He never 

 threw the first stone. But if any one threw a first. stone at him, 

 he did not always stop with a second stone in return. He arrested 

 the throwing of stones from the enemy's quarter by throwing them 

 from his own side with such rapidity, force and well-directed aim, 

 that he who began the quarrel was soon obliged to retreat pre- 

 cipitately from the field. Thus he dealt with the Quaker Assembly 

 of Pennsylvania, long bearing and long forbearing; but when pro- 

 voked past measure, bearding them in their den, dragging them 

 across the ocean before the king in council, reversing all their 

 decrees, and then compelling them to assemble in their own juris- 

 diction and hear, in the presence of their constituents, the royal 

 record of their humiliation.* He acted in short, much like a man 

 who, having been bitten by some snarling whelp, takes him with 

 one hand by the back of the neck, and, holding his head in the 

 air, with a whip in the other, lashes him till the animal's sides are 

 so corrugated with welts that he never can be found again to 

 offend anybody. This was acting, no doubt, much in accord with 

 that good council which, while advising that a man "beware of 

 entrance in a quarrel," yet adds: 



" But being in, 

 Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee," 



though not acting with that better teaching which tells us that 

 when smitten on one cheek we should turn the other for the 



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*See Vol. I., pp. 208, 209. 



