Fierce and cruel as was the persecution in England it was far exceeded by the tortures which awaited the first Quaker missionaries in the New World. Barely fifty years earlier the Pilgrim Fathers had left the homeland and gone forth into an unknown wilderness, there to establish freedom of worship; their descendants, by bitter persecution of the Quakers, demonstrated their failure—in spite of their own sufferings—to learn the lesson of religious toleration. The general attitude of those in authority in the Colonies is very well pourtrayed in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Ward, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1645: “It is said that men ought to have liberty of conscience and that it is _persecution_ to debar them of it. I can rather stand amazed than reply to this. It is an astonishment that the brains of a man should be parboiled in such impious ignorance”; and, further, John Callender, writing in 1739, said that in 1637 “the true Grounds of Liberty of Conscience were not then known or embraced by any Sect or Party of Christians.”[37] The early history of the New England Colony shows that, some years before the advent of the Quakers, religious differences had arisen amongst the Colonists, and a certain section of the community had not escaped persecution. Anne Hutchinson, a brave and intrepid woman, had boldly protested against what might almost be termed a purely theological religion and the extreme power which was of necessity vested in the priest, which was the basis of the Puritan faith. Dr. Rufus Jones states the differing points of view very clearly:[38] The real issue, as I see it in the fragments that are preserved, was an issue between what we nowadays call “religion of the first-hand type,” and “religion of the second-hand type,” that is to say, a religion on the one hand which insists on “knowledge of acquaintance” through immediate experience, and a religion on the other hand which magnifies the importance and sufficiency of “knowledge about.”