I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex
Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regret
it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,
regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the
administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise
noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune
it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed. He honestly
thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that
conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth,
responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its
inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to
save his people from perilous heresy.
The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly
exaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with
that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted
that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which
has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of
conscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted
against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates,
must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high
tempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his,
Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but
it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much
under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did
from the magisterial whip.
Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and
their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which
the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.
