Soon after this a party was arrested and "whipped at the cart's tail up and down the town with twenty lashes." On the same day, fourteen Quakers were arrested at a meeting, and twelve of them whipped: the other two had their fines paid by their friends. At the next meeting, fourteen or fifteen more, including some strangers, were arrested and whipped. And yet the Quakers continued their meetings; and, finally, one of them was so large, that, as it is said, "fearfulness surprised the hypocrites," and the meeting was not molested.[6] Hutchinson says, "Notwithstanding the great variety of sectaries in England, there had been no divisions of any consequence in the Massachusetts; but from 1637 to 1656, they enjoyed, in general, great quietness in their ecclesiastical affairs, discords in particular churches being healed and made up by a submission to the arbitrament of neighboring churches, and sometimes the interposition of the civil power." But soon after all this, commencing indeed in 1655, in New England, continues Hutchinson, "it must be confessed, that bigotry and cruel zeal prevailed, and to that degree that no opinions but their own could be tolerated. They were sincere but mistaken in their principles; and absurd as it is, it is too evident, they believed it to be for the glory of God to take away the lives of his creatures for maintaining tenets contrary to what they professed themselves." It is said, however, "that every religion which is persecuted becomes itself persecuting; for as soon as, by some accidental turn, it arises from persecution, it attacks the religion which persecuted it." Perhaps the Puritans thought they had been persecuted! It seems to be understood that the Quakers finally got a standing in Boston, and a meeting-house, as, in 1667, mention is made of their "ordinary place of meeting," though their numbers were small. The Baptists, however, did not get their meeting-house until 1679; and then, as a law had been passed against the building of meeting-houses without permission of the county courts, theirs was built as a private house, and afterwards purchased by them. But Drake says, "The times had become so much changed that such a law could not be very well enforced." By this time, also, the matter was again brought to the notice of the king, Charles II.; and he wrote, on July 24, to the authorities of Boston, "requiring them not to molest people in their worship, who were of the Protestant faith, and directing that liberty of conscience should be extended to all such." This letter, it is said, had some effect on the rulers, although they regarded it as an interference with their chartered rights; and, after all, it was rather a development of that common sense which fanaticism and bigotry had so long obscured, possibly awakened by the order of the king, rather than controlled by it, that brought about the change in the spirit of persecution.