_Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. i, p. 348; also, _The Heart of New England rent at the Blasphemies of the present Generation_; Cambridge, 1659. The liberty of conscience which the more liberal part of the community was striving for he denounced as liberty “to answer the dictates of the errors of Conscience in walking contrary to Rule. It is a liberty to blaspheme, a liberty to seduce others from the true God. A liberty to tell lies in the name of the Lord” (p. 51). We may note here that several New England historians, as one of the defenses of Massachusetts, lay stress upon the vituperative language employed by the Quakers. As a matter of fact, none found in the contemporary records at all equals that of the Puritans, the violence of whose language is open for any to read in their legislative enactments and state documents. Many remarks addressed by officers of the Puritan courts, from Endicott down, to their helpless prisoners, could be expressed in modern books only by a series of dashes. Footnote 690: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 349, 367, 366; Bishop, _New England Judged_, p. 107. There is no doubt that Mary Dyer, William Robinson, and Marmaduke Stevenson had counted the full cost when they returned from banishment to face certain death, in the autumn of 1659. Sentence was pronounced on the eighteenth of October, and the execution took place a few days later.[691] On the petition of her son, Mary Dyer had been reprieved, and was once more banished; but with a fiendish ingenuity of cruelty, she was not to know of it, and was to be led to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to wait while the two men were being hung. As they were led to execution, the three walked hand in hand. “Are you not ashamed to walk between two young men?” asked the Puritan marshal, with characteristic coarseness. “It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world,” answered the pure-hearted woman. “No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshing of the spirit of the Lord which I now enjoy.”[692] After the others had died, her hands and legs were bound, her face covered, and the rope adjusted around her neck. At that moment her reprieve was announced to her. She refused to accept her life, but was taken to Rhode Island by her family. The following spring, however, she returned and told the General Court that she was to bear witness against the unjust law, which this time was allowed to take its course.[693] A few months later, another Quaker, William Leddra, suffered the same penalty. Footnote 691: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 383 _f._ Footnote 692: Bishop, _New England Judged_, p. 134. Footnote 693: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. i, p. 419.