Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic, which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights. Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and imprison men for their consciences.” The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in the other balance the excesses committed, and the penal laws enacted from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands; they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with the Reformation. In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of the _Cujus regio ejus religio_ (Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not dragged to the altar.”