When the Rancocus returned, a few months after the repulse of the pirates, she had on board of her some fifty emigrants; the council still finding itself obliged to admit the friends of families already settled in the colony, on due application.  Unhappily, among these emigrants were a printer, a lawyer, and no less than four persons who might be named divines.  Of the last, one was a presbyterian, one a methodist,—­the third was a baptist, and the fourth a quaker.  Not long after the arrival of this importation, its consequences became visible.  The sectaries commenced with a thousand professions of brotherly love, and a great parade of Christian charity; indeed they pretended that they had emigrated in order to enjoy a higher degree of religious liberty than was now to be found in America, where men were divided into sects, thinking more of their distinguishing tenets than of the Being whom they professed to serve.  Forgetting the reasons which brought them from home, or quite possibly carrying out the impulses which led them to resist their former neighbours, these men set to work, immediately, to collect followers, and believers after their own peculiar notions.  Parson Hornblower, who had hitherto occupied the ground by himself, but who was always a good deal inclined to what are termed “distinctive opinions,” buckled on his armour, and took the field in earnest.  In order that the sheep of one flock should not be mistaken for the sheep of another, great care was taken to mark each and all with the brand of sect.  One clipped an ear, another smeared the wool (or drew it over the eyes) and a third, as was the case with Friend Stephen Dighton, the quaker, put on an entire covering, so that his sheep might be known by their outward symbols, far as they could be seen.  In a word, on those remote and sweet islands, which, basking in the sun and cooled by the trades, seemed designed by providence to sing hymns daily and hourly to their maker’s praise, the subtleties of sectarian faith smothered that humble submission to the divine law by trusting solely to the mediation, substituting in its place immaterial observances and theories which were much more strenuously urged than clearly understood.  The devil, in the form of a “professor,” once again entered Eden; and the Peak, with so much to raise the soul above the grosser strife of men, was soon ringing with discussions on “free grace,” “immersion,” “spiritual baptism,” and the “apostolical succession.”  The birds sang as sweetly as ever, and their morning and evening songs hymned the praises of their creator as of old; but, not so was it with the morning and evening devotions of men.  These last began to pray at each other, and if Mr. Hornblower was an exception, it was because his admirable liturgy did not furnish him with the means of making these forays into the enemy’s camp.