Chapter 29 - Page 2

self, however, and
an almost total forgetfulness of God, took the place of the colonial
humility with which they had commenced their career in this new region.
These feelings were greatly heightened by three agents, that men
ordinarily suppose might have a very different effect--religion, law,
and the press.

When the Rancocus returned, a few months after the repulse of the
pirates, she had on board of her some fifty emigrants; the council still
finding itself obliged to admit the friends of families already settled
in the colony, on due application. Unhappily, among these emigrants were
a printer, a lawyer, and no less than four persons who might be named
divines. Of the last, one was a presbyterian, one a methodist,--the
third was a baptist, and the fourth a quaker. Not long after the arrival
of this importation, its consequences became visible. The sectaries
commenced with a thousand professions of brotherly love, and a great
parade of Christian charity; indeed they pretended that they had
emigrated in order to enjoy a higher degree of religious liberty than
was now to be found in America, where men were divided into sects,
thinking more of their distinguishing tenets than of the Being whom they
professed to serve. Forgetting the reasons which brought them from home,
or quite possibly carrying out the impulses which led them to resist
their former neighbours, these men set to work, immediately, to collect
followers, and believers after their own peculiar notions. Parson
Hornblower, who had hitherto occupied the ground by himself, but who was
always a good deal inclined to what are termed "distinctive opinions,"
buckled on his armour, and took the field in earnest. In order that the
sheep of one flock should not be mistaken for the sheep of another,
great care was taken to mark each and all with the brand of sect. One
clipped an ear, another smeared the wool (or drew it over the eyes) and
a third, as was the case with Friend Stephen Dighton, the quaker, put on
an entire covering, so that his sheep might be known by their outward
symbols, far as they could be seen. In a word, on those remote and sweet
islands, which, basking in the sun and cooled by the trades, seemed
designed by providence to sing hymns daily and hourly to their maker's
praise, the subtleties of sectarian faith smothered that humble
submission to the divine law by trusting solely to the mediation,
substituting in its place immaterial observances and theories which were
much more strenuously urged than clearly understood. The devil, in the
form of a "professor," once again entered Eden; and the Peak, with so
much to raise the soul above the grosser strife of men, was soon ringing
with discussions on "free grace,"