When the Platform was presented for ratification by the General Court, through the towns, it seems to have met with considerable opposition on the part of the deputies. The magistrates, owing to their customary close working agreement with the ministers, approved of it unanimously; but the deputies, representing public opinion rather than the oligarchy, repeated their opposition of several years earlier. When, in 1645, new laws had been proposed for the punishment of heretics, a brief entry in the records tells of the struggle at that time. “The Howse of Deputies,” so it reads, “cannot concur with our honored magistrates in their bill to punish excommunicate persons.”[646] They were defeated, however, and the next year a long act was passed for the purpose.[647] Although the Cambridge Platform had been adopted by the synod in 1648, and had been considered several times by the General Court, the deputies of many of the towns, even three years later, still professed themselves unable to “see light to impose any forms as necessary to be observed by the churches as a bindinge rule.”[648] When it was finally passed by the Court, in October, 1651, fourteen of the deputies still refused to concur, and their names, an honored roll, are inscribed in the margin of the records.[649] The towns they represented were Boston, Salem, Braintree, Watertown, Roxbury, Wenham, Reading, Sudbury, Weymouth, and Hingham, in Massachusetts, and Hampton in New Hampshire.[650] Footnote 646: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. III, p. 16. Footnote 647: _Ibid._, p. 99. Footnote 648: _Ibid._, p. 236. Footnote 649: _Ibid._, p. 240. Footnote 650: Walker, _Creeds_, p. 188 _n._ The Platform represented no mere abstract doctrine. The whole history of the oligarchy, thus far, indicated that the clauses regarding heresy and schism were not intended to remain dead letters. The new relations of the churches to one another, and the strengthened combination of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, mark the high point attained by the theocracy in its organized opposition to liberty of thought. It had been growing steadily narrower and more intolerant, more insistent upon the extirpation of every idea, religious or political, that disturbed its own control over the minds and lives of men. Unfortunately, at the very time when new power for evil was thus being placed in its hands by the action of the synod and the General Court, the more conservative leaders, both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, were lost to their communities by death, and the dangerous weapons were to be wielded by two of the most bigoted and blood-thirsty fanatics whom either Old or New England had produced.