The Pioneer Quakers (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 'Twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own." History's pages record the erection of a scaffold on Boston Common, upon which the Quakers sealed their devotion to religious liberty with their blood, but Professor Lowell, remembering this scaffold, is unable or unwilling to free himself from the environment of Puritan tradition, and strikes the names of its victims from his list of " Earth's chosen heroes," with the contemptuous remark, that they "were martyrs to the bee in their bonnets." His scorn for the Quakers is born of his ignorance of their faith; for ignorance alone could lead such an intelligent writer and distinguished champion of liberty, to speak of Quakerism as a " gadfly " and a " maggot," and to pillory some of its noblest and most heroic devotees with his witty and withering censure, all of which he does in his essay on " New England Two Centuries Ago." Hildreth wrote in fair spirit, but, in the very limited space he devotes to the subject, finds room for an occasional error. " Honest but one-eyed Mr. Palfrey "l reliedtoo much upon Dr. Ellis for his information, and is therefore himself untrustworthy. Bancroft repeats the blunders of 1 Whether Dr. Palfrey wrote as a blind partisan or an impartial historian may be judged from his remark that " they [the Quakers] should not have been put to death. Sooner than put them to death, it were devoutly to be wished that the annoyed dwellers in Massachusetts had opened their hospitable drawing-rooms to naked women, and suffered their ministers to ascend the pulpits by steps paved with fragments of glass bottles." ? History of New England, ii: 485. ...