The last Quaker that suffered death was William Ledra; he too had returned after sentence of banishment; and being again offered his life, on condition of his leaving the country, replied that he was willing to die; and, accordingly, in March 1660, he was executed. Imprisonment went on, and whipping at the cart’s-tail began, but the poor Quakers were as determined as ever; and in proportion as the magistrates were more cruel, they became more infatuated. Strange that the rulers did not see that the one excess was the result of the other! They entered the congregations during the time of worship, and denounced the preaching to be an abomination to the Lord. They went through the streets crying out that the day of the Lord’s vengeance was at hand; and one woman even, otherwise decorous, forgot the natural modesty and self-respect of her sex so far as to appear naked in the streets. To what extent this mad zeal might have gone on the one hand, and the bigotry of punishment and persecution on the other, there is no saying. But the one died gradually and naturally away, when the other ceased, in consequence of an order from Charles II. in 1661, the report of these atrocities having reached England, when it was ordered that a stop should be put to all capital or corporeal punishment of the people called “Quakers.” While persecution was thus outraging the spirit of Christianity, a noble apostle of Christ was labouring in the divine spirit of his Great Master, and to him we will now turn, glad to leave so hideous an aspect of religion for another beautiful in the love of Christ. We refer to John Eliot, the missionary of the Indians.