exampled bravery, penetrates their wilds; presents himself meekly, but fearlessly, in the midst of their council of war; and, by the help of God, dissolves the grand conspiracy. The Pequods, however, are desperate, and determined to provoke war. "To John Mason, the staff of command was delivered at Hartford by the venerated Hooker; and after nearly a whole night, spent, at the request of the soldiers, in importunate prayer by the very learned and godly Stone, about sixty men, one-third of the whole colony, aided by John Underhill and twenty gallant recruits, whom the forethought of Vane had sent from the Bay State, sailed past the Thames." This Christian army would keep the holy sabbath on the way, and would open an honorable parley with the savages before firing a gun; but there was no alternative. They must fight and conquer, or their wives and children would fall the bleeding victims of savage ferocity.

The war is begun, and by bullets and swords, and raging flames, against bows and arrows: it is a war of extermination. How terrible the necessity! How sad the record of history!

Peace has come; and now these thinking, worshipping pioneers proceed to construct a government. Its grand fundamental provisions are very few and simple; but centuries of advancing civilization will hardly be able to improve them. A free, equal, representative government, a republic of justice, are the few words which express the whole.

One such independent sovereignty, it would seem, ought to be enough for "the State of Connecticut." But the people will be their own judges. In 1638, we see another Puritan colony rising up at New Haven "under the guidance of John Davenport as its pastor, and of the excellent Theophilus Eaton, who was annually elected its governor for twenty years, till his death."

Here was "austere, unmixed Calvinism; but the spirit of humanity had sheltered itself under the rough exterior." “Under a branching oak," while it was yet cold, the people gathered, and listened to the solemn words of Davenport.

They had been, "like the Son of man, led into the wilderness to be tempted." After a day of fasting and prayer, they rested their first form of government on a simple plantation-covenant, -that "all of them would be ordered by the rules which the Scriptures held forth to them."

They would recognize the rights of the Indians, and obtain fairly a title to their lands.

In another year, assembled in a barn, they sought to perfect their organization; and, by the influence of Davenport, it was solemnly resolved that the Scriptures are the perfect rule of a commonwealth; that the purity and peace of the ordinances to themselves and their posterity were the great end of civil order; and that church-members only should be free burgesses." "Eaton, Davenport, and five others, were the 'seven pillars' for the New Haven of wisdom in the wilderness." Other towns, as they arose, followed their unique example; and the Bible became the grand statute-book of New Haven, and the elect were its freemen.

This is Connecticut, substantially, for the whole period of preparation now under consideration. They will increase in numbers and wisdom; but they are "gospellers and psalmsingers" to the end of the world, and all over creation.

We deplore the narrowness which moved these stern primitive legislators to limit the right of franchise to members of the church; but we bear to them profound respect for their loyal devotion to the grand truths of revelation, and their sincere homage to the "Lord of lords, and King of kings." In this they caught the true American thought and principle, in the neglect of which, we, as a nation, have suffered the most severe and well-deserved chastisements.

RHODE ISLAND.

The history of this State can never be separated from the character, opinions, and enterprise of Roger Williams.

We have already seen, that, when he entered Massachu

setts, he was in advance of the general sentiment of the Puritans on the question of religious liberty. On the one hand, he would not consent to even a nominal connection with Prelacy that he had calmly and deliberately renounced forever. On the other hand, he rose to the clearest conception of religious freedom known among men. However wrong the Church might be, it was not the right of any man nor any government forcibly to correct the wrong, even to save the Church from the most destructive heresy. Though it was the highest, noblest right for every man to consecrate himself to the service of God, no man, no number of men, had the right to compel him to this service. Roger Williams was more than a Puritan. He was the great mind ordained of Providence to advance beyond the position of indignant protest against oppression, to the revelation that the highest right must itself be the result of a freedom which might be abused by consenting to the deepest wrong. He was the first true type of the American freeman, conceding fully to all others the high-born rights which he claimed for himself. This was farther than Puritanism could lead the race; and, for the present, it was not ready to follow.

Roger Williams could not join the Church in Boston. It was vain to attempt to make him pastor of Salem. He could try it once and again; but the spirit of the place and the standard of the people cramped him. He was too bold and outspoken against the intolerance of his brethren to stay there. Nor did God intend that he should remain in Plymouth. He must be thrust out to lead the nation on toward the goal of their providential future.

He was a very trotiblesome man for bigotry to manage. He was too good, apparently, to be persecuted; too strong in his logical position and defence to be put down by argu"An unbelieving soul," he said, " is dead in sin." To force him from one kind of worship to another "was like shifting a dead man into several changes of apparel." "No one should be bound to worship, or to maintain a worship,

against his own consent." No man ought to be disfranchised because he was not a member of the Church. "The removal of the yoke of soul oppression, as it will prove an act of mercy and righteousness to the enslaved nations, so it is of binding force to engage the whole, and every interest and conscience to preserve the common liberty and peace.”

He denied the right to coerce a man to take the freeman's oath; but would not he himself be compelled to take it? No; he refused: and such was the firm dignity of his bearing, "that the government was forced to desist from that proceeding."

But he was living under a religion established by law,not Prelacy, but Puritanism, in which intolerance was just as vile to him, and just as determined against a nonconformist. "The ministers got together, and declared any one worthy of banishment who should obstinately assert that 'the civil magistrate might not intermeddle, even to stop a church from apostasy and heresy." He was under the ban of the Church; but the people would have him for a "teacher." They were punished by the loss of lands; and he would unite with them in "letters of admonition unto all the churches whereof any of the magistrates were members, that they might admonish the magistrates of their injustice." This was treason, and the storm coming on was too severe for his church. They forsook him, and even his wife turned against him. He will promptly assert his right of withdrawal. Hear him: "My own voluntary withdrawing from all these churches, resolved to continue in persecuting the witnesses of the Lord, presenting light unto them, I confess it was mine own voluntary act; yea, I hope the act of the Lord Jesus, sounding forth in me the blast, which shall, in his own holy season, cast down the strength and confidence of those inventions of men."

When arraigned before the civil magistrates, he “maintained the rocky strength of his ground; ready to be bound and banished, and even to die in New England," rather than be untrue to his honest convictions.

"At a time when Germany was the battle-field for all Europe in the implacable wars of religion, when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions, when France was still to go through the fearful struggle with bigotry, when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance, almost half a century before William Penn became an American proprietary, and two years before Descartes founded modern philosophy on the method of free reflection, Roger Williams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty. It became his glory to found a State upon that principle, and to stamp himself upon its rising institutions in characters so deep, that the impress has remained to the present day, and can never be erased without the total destruction of the work."* "He was," continues Bancroft in one of his most eloquent passages, “the first person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law; and, in its defence, he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor."

The

But before the bar of "civil liberty" in Massachusetts his doom was sealed. The stern urgency of Cotton seems to have been almost necessary to prevent, even then, a revolt from prescriptive bigotry. But the act was recorded. immortal Williams was an exile; but, in the struggle, so much light had forced itself into the surrounding darkness, that an apologetic tone was assumed in explaining and vindicating the decree. It was necessary to preserve inviolate the "oaths for making trial of the fidelity of the people," and to avert a movement which seemed likely "to subvert the fundamental state and government of the people."

It was not absolutely insisted that he should go out among the savages in the severity of the winter. He might remain till spring; but even this was not without danger to the stability of Puritan freedom. There were many in Salem who loved Roger Williams, and who hung upon his lips

* Bancroft, i. 375.