teenth-century, a proposition so comprehensive, that it is difficult to say whether its application has produced the most beneficial result upon religion, or morals, or politics." This striking figure was Roger Williams, a Welshman, then about thirty years old, who had taken his degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but who had incurred the hostility of Laud for the boldness of his opinions. He was a man of scholarship and ability, with all of a Welshman's fiery love of argument, “conscientiously contentious," as one of his biographers has said; but “most men who contribute materially towards bringing about great changes, religious or moral, are 'conscientiously contentious.' Were they not so they would not accomplish the work they are here to do"; pugnacious, turbulent, and at times guilty of "blazing indiscretions," but always overflowing with charity and driven impetuously forward to preach the great doctrine of civil and religious liberty. A very human man this, "lovely in his carriage," whom men of his race trusted and the Indians loved, "a mighty and benignant form, always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the rectification of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance towards men's bodies and souls." Not the kind of man who would easily fit into “the Puritan starch and uniform,"

1 Arnold: History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. i, p. 20.

2 Adams: Massachusetts: Its Historians and its History, p. 25. Tyler: History of American Literature, p. 243.

but one who would rudely shock the narrow formulas of stiff saints cast in the mould of an ironbound church. He was determined to run counter to the theocratic oligarchy.

Invited soon after his coming to Salem to become assistant to the pastor, he quickly incurred the displeasure of the rulers of Massachusetts by writing a treatise in which he attacked the validity of the Massachusetts patent, holding that the King had no power to grant the land to settlers unless they purchased it from the Indians. Such a doctrine was monstrous, as it struck at the root of all society and would have established the duty of the strong to respect the rights of weak, native races, which, if observed, robbed colonization of its great profit and gave little encouragement to adventurers to risk much for the honor of the nation and their own advantage. Not content with this heinous sin, he must needs still further attempt to disrupt society by boldly announcing that the magistrates had arrogated to themselves too much power, and that the state had no right to control the religious opinion of its subjects. Perhaps it was fortunate for Williams that he gave utterance to these views in Massachusetts and not in England, for there he would probably have been hanged for sedition, at least he would have been branded, and made to stand in the pillory with his ears cropped.

Massachusetts dealt with heresiarchs in another way. The obstinate pastor was brought before the

General Court and offered an opportunity to retract. He stood stubborn in his recusancy. Then began one of those solemn farces which so delighted the Puritans, but which to them was no farce but the great tragedy of Satan fighting to keep his control over a soul brought to damnation through his devilish machinations; to them a ceremony as awful and impressive as the auto-da-fé. Hour after hour he was confronted by the accusing dialecticians, but he faced his judges serenely, perhaps secretly glad to be given this great opportunity to spread his doctrines before this high and mighty audience; and a jury, which convicted him before he uttered the first word in his defence, passed sentence of banishment; or in the delightful euphemism of John Cotton, one of his foremost adversaries, he was "enlarged out of Massachusetts. Tempering justice with mercy, he was given six weeks, it then being the depth of winter, to make his preparations for departure, but Williams was no man to sit with hands folded and tongue bridled. Full of energy and defiance, scorning to recant although he had been condemned, he at once began preparations to found a new colony recruited from men who shared his opinions. This contumacy merited extreme measures, and the rulers of Massachusetts made preparations to rid themselves of their danger by putting Williams on a ship about to sail for England, when he received timely warning and plunged into the wilderness. After many

adventures he and a few followers laid the foundation of a settlement which is now the city of Providence in the state of Rhode Island. It was land belonging to the Indians on which he set foot, and faithful to his principles he made no attempt to seize it, but bought it from the Indians.

We shall for the moment leave Roger Williams beginning the new life at Providence on amicable terms with the Indians and go back to Massachusetts, because certain events there had a direct bearing on what was to become in the course of time a new state; and we get a very clear insight into the Puritan mind and the state of society in the early days of the Massachusetts colony. Williams arrived in New England in 1631. Three years later there came to Boston William Hutchinson and his wife Anne, who was to play the most conspicuous part in a great religious controversy, but it was something much more vital than a mere theological dispute —“it was the first of many New England quickenings in the direction of social, intellectual, and political development, — New England's earliest protest against formulas." This Mistress Anne Hutchinson was a woman "of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment inferior to many women." This is the portrait drawn by one of her bitter enemies and perhaps exaggerates her

1

1 Adams: Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, vol. i, p. 367.

most undesirable qualities and ignores those that redeemed her, but in a few vigorous strokes it paints her probably very true to life. Of her "ready wit and bold spirit," in the moderate words of Winthrop, who had bitter occasion more than once to experience both, there has been given abundant proof. Of her husband little need be said. He is described by contemporaries as “a man of very mild temper and weak parts and wholly guided by his wife."" Perhaps it was fortunate. One small frame house would hardly have been large enough to shelter two such turbulent spirits as Mistress Anne. She was at that time about thirty-four years old, a woman whom not even her most devoted eulogist has called beautiful or even pretty, but who possessed that most insidious and greatest of all gifts of her sex, that indefinable and intangible magnetism of sympathy, the possession of which makes a woman become for the moment vividly interested in the man with whom she holds converse and stimulates him and attracts him; which gives more than it takes and leaves the impress of its own individuality. She was not a learned woman, but she had a remarkable native talent for disputation which she clothed in language difficult to confute. That she exercised great power over men and intellectually fascinated them is indisputable.

In her was the spirit of the mystic as well as that

1 Winthrop: History of New England, vol. i, p. 239.

2 Winthrop: op. cit., vol. i, p. 356.