In the Friends' Records of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is this entry: "Mary Dyer the wife of William Dyer of Newport in Rhode Island: She was put to death at the Town of Boston with ye like cruil hand as the martyrs were in Queen Mary's time, and there buried upon yo 31 day of ye 3a mo. 1660." It will be observed there is an error of a day in the date.

Mary Dyer's Puritan persecutors, strange to say, have found many apologists whose excuses are flimsy indeed. Had her persecutors been Romish priests instead of Puritan ministers and magistrates, such apologists, it is believed, would entertain different views. The persecutions of the Quakers were purely religious and were by no means confined to those who were guilty of improprieties of manner or conduct. Some of

the worthiest inhabitants of Massachusetts were cruelly punished for affording the Quakers shelter, or giving them food, or attending their meetings, and even for merely deprecating the inhumanities practised upon them. There was nothing in Quaker doctrine or practice inherently difficult to get on with. If Rhode Island found no difficulty in enduring the Quakers, why could not the other New England Colonies endure them just as well?

The Puritan persecutors themselves said that Mary Dyer was guilty of her own blood. Human rights were nothing to them when their purposes were crossed, and they wondered at a heroism they could not understand, and which was ready to face death, if need be, in the struggle with oppression. The horrible persecutions themselves

produced the martyrs. Men's minds were wrought up to the highest pitch, and some were so roused that they were willing to die to put down such wrongs. The feeling is well illustrated by the woman who, in 1658, at the sight of the cruel and bloody infliction of thirty-three stripes each upon two Quakers, at Barnstable, with a threecorded knotted whip, cried out in the grief and anguish of her spirit: "How long, O Lord, how long shall it be ere thou avenge the blood of thine elect?” And afterwards in her bewailings she cried: "Did I forsake father and mother and all my dear relatives to come to New England for this? Did I ever think that New England would come to this? Who would have thought it?"

Mary Dyer did not die in vain. But

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one more Quaker was executed,1 and then the torrent of public indignation made itself effectually felt. Governor Endicott stormed and raved at his brother-magistrates for what he deemed their weakness, but it was all in vain; for they would not further imbrue their hands in human blood for such a cause, and even if they would the King sent over to forbid it, ordering the Quakers to be sent to England for trial and punishment. Though the royal order was subsequently modified, and persecution began again and continued for nearly twenty years, yet it went on only intermittently and with decreasing severity until it ceased altogether.2

1 William Leddra, the last. Quaker martyr to suffer death in Massachusetts, was hung on Boston Common March 14, 1661.

2 See Appendix IV. ·

Roger Williams, the great apostle of Soul-Liberty, was thrust out of Massachusetts for conscience sake, but Mary Dyer, a humbler sufferer in the same great cause, to enable the Heaven-implanted principle to obtain root Massachusetts soil itself, persisted in remaining and watering it with her blood, and God gave the increase; so that nowhere on the face of the earth to-day is liberty of conscience more free or more highly revered than on the very spot where, in the words of General Atherton, one of her persecutors, "Mary Dyer did hang as a flag for others to take example by."

Each must judge for himself of the credit due Mary Dyer for her sufferings and death. It is a growing belief that when, in coming ages, the roll shall be made up of those whose lives