This law was an inconsistency, because it was a radical departure from the primal principle of Massachusetts ecclesiasticism, the separation of church and state, and the complete independence of the individual churches.[725] Now it was affirmed that the state must unfold within the church.[726] Indeed, a kind of state church was developed.[727] This is evident from two facts. The clergy were to be supported, not merely by the contributions of actual church-members, but it was decreed that “all who are instructed in the word of God must contribute for those by whom they are taught in all good things.”[728] The government was empowered to curb ecclesiastical errorists; and “if any church should grow schismatical, rending itself from the communion of other churches, or should walk incorrigibly and obstinately in any corrupt way, contrary to the word of God, in such case the civil magistrate was directed to put forth his coercive power.”[729] Thus individual religious independence, child of the Protestant principle, was strangled. Our fathers honestly erred. Purity of religious worship was their goal; and in order to that, they desired the unclogged enjoyment of what they esteemed the divinely-appointed means of grace. Their model was the Mosaic code. They did not remember that God had superseded it by a new dispensation. The Pilgrims were wise and devout men, and in most respects they were a century in advance of their generation; but as a body, they did not understand the golden rule of toleration. Divorcing church and state in theory, in practice they married them. “It is folly,” remarks an English scholar who has himself rehearsed the story of the Pilgrims, “for either British or American encomiasts to seek to disguise this fact. It is on record. All may read it. Impartial history is compelled to acknowledge that very few, even of the foremost thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century, had any just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the New Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole Judge of human faith, and interferes with opinions or creeds only when they run to seed in riot, and develope consequences inimical to social virtue and political order.”[730] But notwithstanding the fact that the Pilgrims erected a theocracy, and by conferring upon the civil arm jurisdiction in religion, opened the way to unjust persecution, it is also true that they “builded better than they knew;” for the principles they professed eventually forced their children to a broader platform. They secured the future. They were the acorn; let the nineteenth century be the oak. “For we doubt not, through the ages One increasing purpose runs; And the thoughts of men are widened With the process of the suns.” CHAPTER XXV. INCIDENTS.