1703, p. 112.]
Thus were free-born English subjects and citizens of Massachusetts dealt
with by the priesthood that ruled the Puritan Commonwealth.
None but ecclesiastical partisans can doubt the bearing of such evidence.
It was the mortal struggle between conservatism and liberality, between
repression and free thought. The elders felt it in the marrow of their
bones, and so declared it in their laws, denouncing banishment under pain
of death against those "adhering to or approoving of any knoune Quaker, or
the tenetts & practices of the Quakers, ... manifesting thereby theire
compliance with those whose designe it is to ouerthrow the order
established in church and commonwealth." [Footnote: _Mass. Rec._ vol. iv.
pt. 1, p. 346.]
Dennison spoke with an unerring instinct when he said they could not live
together, for the faith of the Friends was subversive of a theocracy.
Their belief that God revealed himself directly to man led with logical
certainty to the substitution of individual judgment for the rules of
conduct dictated by a sacred class, whether they claimed to derive their
authority from their skill in interpreting the Scriptures, or from
traditions preserved by Apostolic Succession. Each man, therefore, became,
as it were, a priest unto himself, and they repudiated an ordained
ministry.
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