Finally, Zeal-of-the-land Busy not only consents, but joins the rest, saying, 'In the way of comfort to the weak, I will go and eat. I will eat exceedingly and prophesy; there may be a good use made of it too, now I think on it: by the public eating of swine's flesh, to profess our hate and loathing of Judaism, whereof the brethren stand taxed. I will therefore eat, yea, I will eat exceedingly.'
The entire passage might be regarded as a satirical interpretation of Calvin's chapter on Christian Liberty. In this fashion the anti-Puritan writers of the seventeenth century habitually depicted the people who set up the Commonwealth in England and colonized Massachusetts. In the eyes of unfriendly English contemporaries, the men who came over in the Mayflower and their kind were unctuous hypocrites.
That charge, though it has been revived for modern uses, no longer stands against the seventeenth-century Puritans. Under persecution and in power, on the scaffold, in war, and in the wilderness, they proved that, whatever their faults, they were animated by a passionate sincerity. When the Puritan William Prynne spoke disrespectfully of magistrates and bishops, Archbishop Laud, or his agents, cut off his
