George Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol.2, p.353 - p.354
The public mind in that province, especially in Boston, was earnestly inquiring into the active powers of man, to deduce from them the right to uncontrolled inquiry, as the only security against religious and civil bondage. Of that cause the champion was Jonathan Mayhew, offspring of purest ancestors, "sanctified" from childhood, a pupil of New England's Cambridge. "Instructed in youth," thus he spoke of himself, "in the doctrines of civil liberty, as they were taught by such men as Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero, and others, among the ancients; and such as Sidney and Milton, Locke and Hoadly, among the moderns, I liked them; and having learned from the holy scriptures that wise, brave, and virtuous men were always friends to liberty, that God gave the Israelites a king in his anger, because they had not sense and virtue enough to like a free commonwealth, and that where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, this made me conclude that freedom is a great blessing." From early life, Mayhew took to his heart the right of private judgment, clinging to it as to his religion; truth and justice he revered as realities which every human being had capacity to discern; the duty of each individual to inquire and judge he deduced from the constitution of man, and held to be as universal as reason itself. At once becoming revolutionary, he scoffed at receiving opinions because his forefathers had embraced them; and, pushing the principle of Protestantism to its universal expression, he sent forth the American mind to do its work, disburdened of prejudices. The ocean which it had crossed had broken the trail of tradition, and it was now to find paths of its own.