We cannot, perhaps, blame men for not being in advance of their age, or even for being behind it. The founders of the Bay Colony were but little qualified, by reason of the narrowness of their views and the intensity with which they were held, to lead men to any higher ground than that which they had been accustomed to tread. Moreover, having changed their place from members of an opposition to members of a government, their new responsibilities would tend to foster even more strongly that fear of innovation which is nearly always characteristic of the middle-class man in power. The exercise of authority is apt to prove an intoxicating draught, even to the best-intentioned men who have been unaccustomed to it; and, of the tiny group who now claimed absolute sway over two thousand subjects, rapidly increasing to sixteen thousand, none had held any position of administrative importance in the old country. Some of them had, indeed, occupied offices, but they were rather of a nature to encourage that intolerance of contradiction, and tendency to arbitrary action upon a small stage, which are apt, in time, to become characteristic of the petty judge, the schoolmaster and the clergyman. Of Endicott's whole career in England, for example, we know only that his rector spoke of him as “a man well knowne to divers persons of good note,”[347] which, in reference to a parishioner in a small country town, more probably referred to his moral character than to any administrative experience. Winthrop had held an unimportant position in a law court. Dudley had managed the estate of a nobleman. Cotton was the rector of a large provincial parish. The work which they and the other leaders did was done honestly; and although the course they pursued, in regard both to the religious qualification for the franchise, and to the later persecutions for religious beliefs, was, in the long run, to hamper the growth of the colony and to be partly responsible for the eventual loss of the charter, they should not be too severely condemned, perhaps, for the illegal and unjust, as well as politically unwise, course, upon which they now entered. It must be said, however, that, when the great opportunity was offered them of advancing the cause of religious liberty, they turned aside. To the new voices being raised on behalf of justice and humanity, the Massachusetts leaders were as deaf as Laud and the Anglican hierarchy. Equally, and for the same reason, each party solidly and consciously blocked the path to toleration in so far as lay in its power. Footnote 347: White, _Planter's Plea_, p. 43.