But, for the most part, the Quakers did no more than describe, in Biblical terms as was the custom of the day, the soul-state of their persecutors. They had been bred Puritans, and spoke the Puritan language. If Mary Prince called Endicott, as he passed her Boston prison, “vile oppressor and tyrant,” she spoke the truth mildly. “There is but one god, and you do not worship that god which we worship,” fulminated Juggins, the magistrate, in the trial of Lydia Wright. “I believe thou speakest truth,” returned the accused calmly. “For if you worshipped that God which we worship, you would not persecute His people.” “Take her away!” cried the court. “Away with him, away with him,” had been the only recourse left an earlier tribunal. It was natural that the seemly magistrates of Plymouth objected to these new citizens who, when summoned “for not taking the oath of fidelity to the government,” announced that they “held it unlawful to take the oath”; and they flatly refused to pay tithes for the support of a clergy they despised. Nor were they without sympathizers in that contention. “The law enacted about ministers’ maintenance was a wicked and devilish law,” declared Doctor Fuller, of Barnstable. “The devil sat at the stern when it was enacted.” And for his vehemence, though a true believer, he was fined fifty shillings by the General Court, which at the same term had the even mind to elect him, for his ability, one of the war council, and later to appoint him surgeon-general of the colony’s troops. Quakers held parsons in light esteem, yet not one of the Cape clergy could have conceived such a plan as Cotton Mather, in 1682, spread before Higginson of Salem. “There be now at sea a skipper,” wrote he, “which has aboard a hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants called Quakers, with William Penn, who is ye scamp at ye head of them.” Mather went on to recount that secret orders had gone out to waylay the ship “as near ye coast of Codde as may be and make captives of ye Penn and his ungodly crew, so that ye Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on ye soil of this new country with ye heathen worship of these people.” Then the astounding proposition: “Much spoil can be made by selling ye whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rumme and sugar. We shall not only do ye Lord great service by punishing the Wicked, but shall make gayne for his ministers and people.” The precious scheme somehow miscarried, the threatened engagement off “Codde” did not take place, and Philadelphia was founded.