In the west of England, where the fire first broke out, moderation, christian forbearance, and charity, seemed to have been wholly extinguished. The reverend and learned Mr. James Peirce, minister in the city of Exeter, was dismissed from his congregation, upon a charge of heresy; and treated by his opposers, with shameful rudeness and insolence. Other congregations were also practised with, to discard their pastors upon the same suspicion, who were accused of impiously “denying the Lord that bought them;” to render them odious to their congregations, merely because they could not come up to the unscriptural tests of human orthodoxy. And when several of the ministers of London thought proper to interpose, and try, if by advices for peace, they could not compose the differences of their brethren in the west; this christian design was as furiously opposed as if it had been a combination to extirpate christianity itself; and a proposal made in the room of it, that the article of the church of England, and the answer in the assembly’s catechism, relating to the trinity, should be subscribed by all the ministers, as a declaration of their faith, and a test of their orthodoxy. This proposal was considered by many of the ministers, not only as a thing unreasonable in itself, thus to make inquisition into the faith of others, but highly inconsistent with the character of protestants, dissenting from the national establishment; and dissenting from it for this reason amongst others, because the established church expressly claims “an authority in controversies of faith.” And, therefore, after the affair had been debated for a considerable while, the question was solemnly put, and the proposal rejected by a majority of voices. This the zealots were highly displeased with, and accordingly publicly proclaimed their resentments from the pulpits. Fasts were appointed solemnly to deplore, confess, and pray against the aboundings of heresy; and their sermons directly levelled against the two great evils of the church, Nonsubscription and Arianism. Through the goodness of God they had no power to proceed farther; and when praying and preaching in this manner began to grow tedious, and were, by experience, found to prove ineffectual, to put a stop to the progress of the cause of liberty, their zeal immediately abated, the cry of heresy was seldomer heard, and the alarm of the church’s being endangered by pernicious errors, gradually ceased; it being very observable, that though heresy be ever in its nature the same thing, yet that the cry against it is either more or less, according as the political managers of it, can find more or fewer passions to work on, or a greater or lesser interest to subserve by it. [Illustration] SECT. VI. _Of Persecutions in New England._