The rulers of the colony had now committed themselves to a position from which they could not recede without loss of dignity, and which they could not enforce without great obloquy. They evidently were under the impression that the mere passage of the law would be enough, and that they would never be obliged to proceed to the last extremity. But they miscalculated the perseverance and enthusiasm of the men with whom they had to deal, and were soon involved in a conflict of will from which there seemed to them to be no escape except by putting the law into effect. It would have been better for them to have heeded the wise advice that they had already received from Rhode Island, whose magistrates had replied to one of the former communications of Massachusetts requesting their co-operation in restrictive measures against the Quakers, in these remarkable words: “We have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, etc., their minds and understandings concerning the things and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition. And we, moreover, find that in those places where these people aforesaid in this colony are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come. And we are informed that they begin to loathe this place, for that they are not opposed by the civil authority, but, with all patience and meekness, are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions. Nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way. Surely, we find that they delight to be persecuted by civil powers; and when they are so, they are like to gain more adherents by the conceit of their painful sufferings than by consent to their pernicious sayings.”[19]