Word: puritans
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...Puritan: A pious gentleman, who believed in letting all people do as he liked...
...also wrote parodies that poked fun at Puritan intolerance. In one of them, called "A Witch Trial at Mount Holly," a couple of accused witches were subjected to two tests: weighed on a scale against the Bible, and tossed in the river with hands and feet bound to see if they floated. They agreed to submit--on the condition that two of the accusers take the same test. With colorful details of all the pomp, Franklin described the process. The accused and accusers all succeed in outweighing the Bible. But both of the accused and one of the accusers fail...
Franklin used Mrs. Dogood to attack the theocratic rule of the Puritan establishment and the link between church and state that was then the very foundation of Massachusetts government. At one point she asks, "Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane?" Unsurprisingly, she concludes the former is worse, and singles out the Governor, a minister who had become a politician, as an example. "The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able...
There is, for example, no monument to Anne Hutchinson, the zealous Puritan woman whose challenges to the Puritan clergy of Boston were a large part of the inspiration behind the founding of a college in Cambridge...
...side of the new Anne Dudley Bradstreet gate, a plaque was unveiled to immortalize the words of the female, Puritan poet: “I came into this Country, where I found a new World and new manners at which my heart rose...