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The Puritans _disclaimed_ the right to sit in judgment on the opinions of others. They denied that they persecuted for conscience sake. These and some other statements seem to show that they did not practise as they preached, or gave an interpretation to that practice not in accordance with the understanding and convictions of mankind. To be sure, they had a law to punish any one who spoke disrespectfully of the Scriptures, and at the same time fined, punished, banished, and hung those who entertained and presumed to teach principles, belief, or doctrines in relation to the Scriptures different from their own; not, as they allege, because they had the right to sit in judgment upon them, but because of the dangers of their teaching and practice: in other words, for their own protection,
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as has been said. Nevertheless, maiming, marring, and taking the lives of God's creatures, the equals in every respect of themselves, as Hutchinson puts it, is only to be apologized for or excused by the infirmities of humanity; indeed, we should rather say, is not to be excused on any such ground, and their own doctrine and belief teaches that it was a proceeding to be punished and repented of. This, at any rate, was always the belief of the Quakers. Drake says,
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The persecuted Quakers were fully persuaded that a day of wrath would overtake New England, and they did not fail to declare their belief; and, indeed, it was not long before their predictions were fulfilled: for the terrible war with the Indians, which followed in a few years, was viewed by them as the vengeance of heaven for their cruelty to the Quakers.
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The Gazette, --and this was in manuscript,--unless (as has been reported) there was an older paper of some kind issued at Hong-Kong. The oldest printed newspaper,
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The English Mercury, was issued in England in 1588,[8] but, it is believed, was not regularly published. In the next century, from 1624 onward, newspapers multiplied; and among them were
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The Parliament Kite, and
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The Secret Owl, and some other curious names. Towards the close of this century, the first American newspaper appeared; and possibly this had been preceded by what represented a newspaper, in manuscript, as was the case afterwards in Boston in 1704, when
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The News-Letter first appeared. The first American newspaper was issued in Boston in 1690,--only fifty or sixty years after newspapers became common in England,--if the statements which we have quoted are reliable. But at this time, as might be reasonably supposed, the people who came to this country in order to improve their liberties, were not prepared for a free press, or, one might almost say, for any thing that did not tally with their religious notions and vague superstitions; so that, after the first issue, Sept. 25, 1690, the paper was suppressed, as said, by the