The Merrimack River: its source and its tributaries. Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters./ By J. W. Meader.

THE,IEPRIllIACK RIVER;
low-subjects to endorse and adopt their own peculiar religious tenets.
Thoroughly tconvinced and honestly believing, without doubt, that
theirs was the only true faith, it was sincerely offensive to them that
men should repudiate alike themselves and their creed; that, having
embraced a heresy, they should wilfully persist in being heretics in
spite of the luminous example, and the powerful, untiring, and con vincing moral suasion of the dissenters. But so it was, and in cast ing about for some consistent and efficient means to remedy the moral
obliquity of mankind, it would seem they determined to locate where
they would have the power to apply such needed and wholesome
restraints as the natural perversity and frailty of the human mind
required. They resolved to go where they could establish a mitigated or modified form of inquisition,- where, if heretics came, or
rose up among them, they could hurl the anathemas of the church;
should that not suffice, they could even subject them to such mild
legal discipline as whipping, banishing, cutting off ears, and hanging.
All of these punishments and many others have been inflicted and
endured for conscience' sake in New England. (0 Religion! what
cruelties have been inflicted in thy name! How many monsters and
how many martyrs have been seen in thy holy cause!)
Soon after the consummation of the Wheelwright purchase a fierce
and violent religious controversy broke out, creating a schism among
the Puritans of Boston, and leading to an open rupture in the State.
They were all dissenters, but the dissenting dissenters were called
Intinomians: the latter questioning the policy and disputing the
right to force men to the adoption of any particular religious belief
by legislative enactment, declaring that, as they were free in conscience, they were bound in religion and in honor to maintain the
same right for others, whether inside or out of the close corporation
of Puritanism. The Originals, as they were called, in other words,
the primitive Puritans, while they declared for religious freedom and
toleration, practically controverted their own professions, as the Antinomians declared, by taking the ground and promulgating first the
infallibility of their own creed and the right of every man to embrace
the truth. Ergo, all who worship with them *hould and did enjoy perfect religious freedom, while those who did not, deserved and
should receive condign punishment. Thus will be seen by their
own showing the sum of Puritan toleration.
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