Of such sort were the laws made by the people of Newhaven, previous to their incorporation with Saybrook and Hertford colonies by the charter. They consist of a vast multitude, and were very properly termed _Blue Laws_; i. e. _bloody Laws_; for they were all sanctified with excommunication, confiscation, fines, banishment, whippings, cutting off the ears, burning the tongue, and death. Europe at this day might well say the Religion of the first settlers at Newhaven was fanaticism turned mad; and did not similar laws still prevail over New-England as the common law of the country, I would have left them in silence along with Dr. Mather’s _Patres conscripti_, and the renowned Saints of Mr. Neal, to sleep to the end of time. No one, but a partial and blind bigot, can pretend to say the projectors of them were men of _Grace_, _Justice_, and _Liberty_, when nothing but _murders_, _plunders_, and _persecutions_, mark their steps. The best apology that can be made for them is, (I write in reference to those times,) that human nature is every-where the same; and that the mitred Lord and canting Puritan are both equally dangerous, or that both agree in the unchristian doctrine of persecution, and contend only which shall put it in practice. Mr. Neal says many call the first Colonizers in New-England weak men for separating from the Church of England, and suffering persecutions, rather than comply with indifferent ceremonies; and, after asserting that they were men of great learning and goodness, he appeals to the world to judge, which were weak, the Bishops or the Puritans? My answer is, that those Puritans were weak men in Old England, and strong in New England, where they out-pop’d the Pope, out-king’d the King, and out-bishop’d the Bishops. Their murders and persecutions prove their strength lay in weakness, and their religion in ambition, wealth, and dominion. Notwithstanding the perpetual jealousy and discordance between the three colonies of Connecticut, (Saybrook claiming the whole under the Lords Say and Brook, Hertford under Jehovah and Conquest, and Newhaven under King Jesus and Conquest,) they judged it necessary, for their better security against the Dutch and Indians, to strengthen each other’s hands by forming a general confederacy with the Colonies of New Plymouth and the Massachusets-Bay. A measure of this kind, which they formally entered into in 1643, proved of the most salutary consequence, in a war which many years after broke out between them and Philip, sachem of the Pokanoket Indians, and which, for some time, imminently endangered the Colonies, but at length terminated in the destruction of that noted warrior and his followers.