And the clergy knew and hated their enemy
from the earliest days; it was this bitter theological jealousy which
flamed within Endicott when he mutilated his flag, and within Leverett
when he insulted Randolph; it was a rapacious lust for power and a furious
detestation of rival priests which maddened the Mathers in their onslaught
upon Dudley, which burned undimmed in Mayhew and Cooper, and in their
champion, Samuel Adams, and which at last made the hierarchy cast in its
lot with an ally more dangerous far than those prelates whom it deemed its
foe. For no church can preach liberality and not be liberalized. Of a
truth the momentary spasm may pass which made these conservatives
progressive, and they may once more manifest their reactionary nature,
but, nevertheless, the impulsion shall have been given to that automatic,
yet resistless, machinery which produces innovation; wherefore, in the
next generation, the great liberal secession from the Congregational
communion broke the ecclesiastical power forever. And so, through toil and
suffering, through martyrdoms and war, the Puritans wrought out the
ancient destiny which fated them to wander as outcasts to the desolate New
England shore; there, amidst hardship and apparent failure, they slowly
achieved their civil and religious liberty, and conceived that
constitutional system which is the root of our national life; and there in
another century the liberal commonwealth they had builded led the battle
against the spread of human oppression; and when the war of slavery burst
forth her soldiers rightly were the first to fall; for it is her
children's heritage that, wheresoever on this continent blood shall flow
in defence of personal freedom, there must the sons of Massachusetts
surely be.
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