Early Massachusetts is generally seen by scholars as “intolerant.” But this is to employ a misleading dichotomy between tolerant and intolerant societies which obscures the colonists’ understanding of themselves. They believed that their society instead successfully reconciled individual liberty and communal harmony through rational debate, social consensus, and the pursuit of truth. Their response to the Antinomian controversy is highly revealing in this context, demonstrating that they desired to persuade the aberrant back into the fold and that they reserved political intervention for when dissension had serious public implications. It was only those deemed irreconcilable who were ultimately excluded from the community. To approach the topic in this way is to resist the marginalisation of New England from the history of political and social thought by re-evaluating the ends and actions of the colonists and by providing an important alternative perspective on the nature of toleration and its limits.

中文翻译：

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马萨诸塞州早期的宽容问题

早期的马萨诸塞州通常被学者视为“不宽容”。但这是在宽容和不宽容社会之间采用一种误导性的二分法，它模糊了殖民者对自己的理解。他们认为，他们的社会通过理性辩论、社会共识和对真理的追求，成功地调和了个人自由和社区和谐。在这种情况下，他们对 Antinomian 争议的回应非常具有启发性，表明他们希望说服异常者重新加入他们的圈子，并且他们将政治干预保留在分歧对公众产生严重影响时。只有那些被认为不可调和的人最终被排除在社区之外。