She seems clearly to have been a willful and persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end.

They took the wrong way and tried her for heresy.

In like manner, when the Quakers came among them,--not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early type,--instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which they were not fully entitled.
Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that principle.

It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might be puzzled to name any other church establishment under which less of molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of actual encouragement given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies.

The Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England (subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and fanatic zeal) were large-minded and generous men.
The general uniformity of church organization among the Puritan plantations is the more remarkable in view of the notable independence and originality of the leading men, who represented tendencies of opinion as widely diverging as the quasi-Presbyterianism of John Eliot and the doctrinaire democracy of John Wise.