CHAP. III.] RELIGIOUS TOLERATION. 47 



On Sunday we accompanied the family of a lawyer, to whom 

 we had brought letters, to a Unitarian church. There was 

 nothing doctrinal in the sermon, and, among other indications of 

 the altered and softened feelings of the sects which have sprung 

 from the old Puritan stock, I remarked a gilt cross placed over 

 the altar. The officiating minister told me that this step had 

 been taken with the consent of the congregation, though not with 

 out the opposition of some of his elders. The early Puritans re 

 garded this symbol as they did pictures and images, as the badges 

 of superstition, the relics of the idolatrous religion so lately re 

 nounced by them ; and it is curious to read, in the annals of the 

 first colonists at Salem, how, in 1634, the followers of Roger 

 Williams, the Brownist, went so far as to cut that &quot;popish em 

 blem,&quot; the red cross, out of the royal standard, as one which the 

 train bands ought no longer to follow.^ 



During my first visit to the New England States, I was 

 greatly at a loss to comprehend by what means so large a pop 

 ulation had been brought to unite great earnestness of religious 

 feeling with so much real toleration. In seeking for the cause, we 

 must go farther back than the common schools, or at least the 

 present improved state of popular education ; for we are still met 

 with the question, How could such schools be maintained by the 

 state, or by compulsory assessments, on so liberal a footing, in 

 spite of the fanaticism and sectarian prejudices of the vulgar ? 

 When we call to mind the religious enthusiasm of the early Pu 

 ritans, and how at first they merely exchanged a servile obedience 

 to tradition, and the authority of the Church, for an equally blind 

 scripturalism, or implicit faith in the letter of every part of the 

 Bible, acting as if they believed that God, by some miraculous 

 process, had dictated all the Hebrew words of the Old, and all 

 the Greek of the New Testament ; nay, the illiterate among 

 them cherishing the same superstitious veneration ibr every sylla 

 ble of the English translation how these religionists, who did 

 riot hesitate to condemn several citizens to be publicly whipped 

 for denying that the Jewish code was obligatory on Christians as 

 a rule of life, arid who were fully persuaded that they alone were the 

 # Graham s History of United Stales, vol. i. p. 227. 



