In Cotton's reply, the ministers defended the acts of the Court, and, speaking of the victims' imprisonment, Cotton even descended so low as to write, “I believe they neither of them fared better at home, and I am sure Holmes had not been so well clad of many years before.” More interesting, however, is his plain enunciation of the doctrine that they alone knew the will of God and should lay it down for the community, which we noted in an earlier chapter as one of the outstanding characteristics of Puritanism in every age. “There is a vast difference,” he wrote, “between men's inventions and God's institutions; we fled from men's inventions, to which we else should have been compelled; we compel none to men's inventions.” The inference was, of course, that, whatever the rest of mankind might think, any institution decreed by the Massachusetts ministers was, _ipso facto_, God's. Therefore, “if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian duty.”[662] Four fifths of their fellow citizens might refuse to join their churches; the noblest spirits among the Puritan element in England might plead with them; but in vain. The theocracy had now reached such a height of intellectual pride, of intolerable belief in themselves as the sole possessors of the knowledge of God, and as the only legitimate interpreters of his will to the world, that either all freedom of thought in Massachusetts must die, or their power must be destroyed. In that struggle, the ministers and the magistrates were willing to shed unlimited blood. Fortunately, noble men and women were not lacking to offer themselves as victims that the liberty of God might be made manifest. Footnote 662: Hutchinson, _Papers_, vol. II, pp. 131 _f._