Note 106 — Chapter IV

Hutchinson's Collection of State Papers, etc., pp. 401, 402.

Mr. Cotton wrote a long letter in reply to Sir R. Saltonstall, denying that he or Mr. Wilson had instigated the complaints against the Baptists, yet representing them as profane because they did not attend the established worship, though they worshipped God in their own way. Cotton, assuming that the Baptist worship was no worship, and that the only lawful worship was the Congregational, proceeds to defend compulsory attendance at the established worship upon the ground of preventing Sabbath profaneness (which was a perversion of Sir R. Saltonstall's letter), the same as compulsory attendance at the established worship was justified in the time of Elizabeth and James the First, and against which the whole army of Puritan writers had contended. Some of Cotton's words were as follows: "But (you say) it doth make men hypocrites to compel men to conforme the outward men for fear of punishment. If it did so, yet better be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give God part of his due, the outward man; but the profane person giveth God neither the outward or inward man."—"If the magistrate connive at his absenting himself from the Sabbath duties, the sin will be greater in the magistrate than can be the other's coming."

Mr. Hutchinson, referring to Sir R. Saltonstall's letter, says:—"It discovers a good deal of that catholic spirit which too many of our first settlers were destitute of, and confirms what I have said of Mr. Dudley's zeal in the first volume of the Massachusetts History."