It must be presumed that the ministers of Christ considered this as a more “honorable” course than arbitration with “a few fugitives” from their vindictiveness. The attack was made on a Sabbath morning, and even the heretical Gorton was naturally surprised.[533] In receiving the Indians under their jurisdiction, Massachusetts had required that the savages should not profane that day by doing any work upon it, and that they should not kill any man but upon just cause and authority.[534] The attempt, immediately following, on the part of that colony's expedition, to burn their fellow white men alive during church hours, because they were too impatient to wait, may have struck their new savage subjects as a little incongruous. Nine of the Gortonists were captured, taken to Boston, and imprisoned. The clergy called for blood, and gave their written opinion that all nine of the prisoners “deserved death by the law of God.” In this unjust and inhuman decision, all the magistrates but three concurred, and it was prevented from passing only by the people's representatives among the deputies. Finally, the prisoners were condemned to be distributed among seven towns, there to be “kept to worke for their living, and wear irons upon one leg, and not to depart the limits of the town, nor by word or writing maintain any of their blasphemous or wicked errors upon pain of death.”[535] The sentence was executed and the prisoners were kept in irons until the following year; when the growing popular disapproval of the clergy's actions caused their victims to be suddenly released and banished.[536] Footnote 533: Gorton, _Simplicities Defence_; Force Tracts, vol. IV, pp. 58 _ff._ Footnote 534: J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, p. 147. Footnote 535: _Ibid._, vol. II, pp. 176 _f._; _Massachusetts Records_, vol. II, pp. 51 _ff._; Gorton, _Simplicities Defence_, pp. 66 _ff._ Footnote 536: J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, pp. 188 _f._; Gorton, _Simplicities Defence_, p. 83. The Massachusetts authorities had thus utilized the request of one faction in a settlement wholly outside their own limits, to extend their jurisdiction. They had attempted, upon a charge of heresy directed against persons living in another colony, to murder the entire body of the opposing faction, after refusing the arbitration proposed by that faction's own enemies. When the decree was finally softened to banishment, this was held to include exclusion of the prisoners from their former homes, now considered as part of the Bay Colony. They had seized and sold the cattle and goods of the unfortunate people, to pay the expenses of their so-called trial and illegal detention. In all this, there had not been even the fallacious plea, as in the case of Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson, that the civil peace of Massachusetts had been endangered.