They advocated, also, the supremacy of the Crown, sole means in that day of curbing the theocracy, and compelling it to yield its monopoly of power.
To this party belonged the Episcopalians, or those inclined to become so; the Baptists, Presbyterians, the Quakers, and other sectaries who feared less the authority of a distant monarch than the present rule of their watchful and bitter spiritual rivals.

In the intermediate was a third party, weak at first but daily growing stronger, and drawing to its ranks, one after another, some former zealous advocates of the exclusive system, convinced that a _theocracy_, in its stricter form, was no longer tenable, and some of them, perhaps, beginning to be satisfied that it was not desirable.

Among the earliest of these were Norton and Bradstreet, the agents who came back from England impressed with the necessity of yielding.

But the avowal of such sentiments was fatal to their popularity (among the Congregational "freemen"), and Norton, accustomed to nothing but reverence and applause, finding himself now looked at with distrust, soon died of melancholy and mortification." (Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol.

I., Chap.
xiv., pp.