They approved not, said they, of persecuting men for conscience' sake, but solely of correcting them for sinning against conscience; and so not persecuting, but punishing heretics. Williams was not a man who could be imposed upon by words, or intimidated by threats; and he accordingly persevered in inculcating his doctrines publicly and vehemently. The clergy, after having endeavoured in vain to shake him by argument and remonstrance, at last determined to call in the aid of the civil authority; and the General Court, after due consideration of the case, passed sentence of banishment upon him, or, as they phrased it, "ordered his removal out of the jurisdiction of the court." Some of the men in power had determined that he should be sent to England; but, when they sent to take him, they found that, with his usual spirit of resolute independence, he had already departed, no one knew whither, accompanied by a few of his people, who, to use their own language, had gone with their beloved pastor "to seek their providences." After some wanderings he pitched his tent at a place, to which he gave the name of Providence, and there became the founder and legislator of the colony of Rhode-Island. There he continued to rule, sometimes as the governor, and always as the guide and father of the settlement, for forty-eight years, employing himself in acts of kindness to his former enemies, affording relief to the distressed, and offering an asylum to the persecuted. The government of his colony was formed on his favourite principle, that in matters of faith and worship, every citizen should walk according to the light of his own conscience, with-out restraint or interference from the civil magistrate. During a visit which Williams made to England, in 1643, for the purpose of procuring a colonial charter, he

published a formal and laboured vindication of this doctrine, under the title of "The Bloody Tenent, or a Dialogue between Truth and Peace." In this work, written with his usual boldness and decision, he anticipated most of the arguments, which, fifty years after, attracted so much attention, when they were brought forward by Locke. His own conduct in power, was in perfect accordance with his speculative opinions; and when, in his old age, the order of his little community was disturbed by an irruption of Quaker preachers, he combated them only in pamphlets and public disputations, and contented himself with overwhelming their doctrines with a torrent of learning, sarcasms, syllogisms, and puns.*

It should also be remembered, to the honour of Roger Williams, that no one of the early colonists, without excepting William Penn himself, equalled him in justice and benevolence towards the Indians. He laboured incessantly, and with much success, to enlighten and conciliate them, and by this means acquired a personal influence among them, which he had frequently the enviable satisfaction of exerting in behalf of those who had banished him. It is not the least remarkable or characteristic incident of his varied life, that within one year after his exile, and while he was yet hot with controversy, and indignant at his wrongs, his first interference with the affairs of his former colony was to protect its frontier settlements from an Indian massacre. From that time forward, though he was never permitted to return to Massachusetts, he was frequently employed by the government of that province in negotiations with the Indians, and on other business of the highest importance. Even Cotton

*The title of one of his books against George Fox, and his follower, Burrowes, is "The Fox digged out of his Burrows."

Mather, in spite of his steadfast abhorrence of Williams's heresy, seems to have been touched with the magnanimity and kindness of the man; and after having stigmatized him as "the infamous Korah of New-England," he confesses, a little reluctantly, that " for the forty years after his exile, he acquitted himself so laudably, that many judicious people judged him to have had the root of the matter in him, during the long winter of his retirement."*

At the very time that the puritan Roger Williams was thus inculcating this humane and wise doctrine in the eastern colonies, a Roman Catholic nobleman, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, was engaged in obtaining a charter and enacting a code of laws for Maryland, on the same liberal principles.

Lord Baltimore had neither the talents nor the eccentricities of Roger Williams, but he was a man of strong sense and great worth. He had passed with reputation through several offices of high political trust and importance, under James I., but in 1624 he resigned all his employments on becoming a convert to the Roman Catholic faith. He then projected a colony at Newfoundland; but after visiting his settlement twice, bestowing great expense and labour upon it, and once in person rescuing it from a French invasion, despairing of success, he abandoned his proprietary rights there, and procured a patent for Maryland. After he had visited and explored the country, he died, while he was engaged in making

* Mather-Magnalia Americana, Book VII. cap. 2. Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society, VI. 245. VII. 3. VIII. 2. IX. 23. X. 15, &c. &c. Brook's Lives of the Puritans, III. 577. Chalmer's Political Annals, p. 269. Quarto edit. Dr. Trumbull (Hist. U. S. vol. I. p. 105,) speaks of Williams with cold praise, though he calls him "a gentleman of benevolence,"

the necessary preparatory arrangements for his undertaking, and before the charter had passed the forms of office; so that there is scarce any historical record of his share in the colonial administration of Maryland. But the little that tradition has preserved respecting him, speaks volumes in his praise. We know that he displayed the most perfect good faith in all his transactions with the natives, and that it was to him that Maryland was indebted for such a liberal code of religious equality, that the province soon became the refuge, not only of the Catholics who fled from Great Britain, but of the Puritans who were driven from Virginia, and of the Quakers exiled from New-England.*

His son, the second Lord Baltimore, deserves also to be named with honour, as having inherited the enterprise and the tolerant spirit of his father.

These admirable examples remained without imitation for nearly half a century, until 1682, when William Penn repeated the same experiment on a much greater scale, and laid the foundation of the government of Pennsylvania, with this "grand fundamental," as he termed it, "that every person should enjoy the free profession of his faith, and exercise of worship, in such way as he should in his conscience believe most acceptable."

The resemblance of character between Penn and Roger Williams, is striking. Penn, like Williams, was enthusiastic, without being bigoted; he had the same benevolence, the same scorn of intellectual slavery, the same love of controversy, and, above all, the same habitual inflexibility of purpose and opinion. But he had mixed more widely in the world, had more experience, and more

* Chalmer's Political Annals, p. 200, 4to. London. Biographia Britannica, article "Calvert," Marshall's Washington, I, 80—83.

knowledge of character, a more bustling activity of disposition, greater skill in the conduct of affairs, and, perhaps, a little more of worldly ambition, as well as much more of worldly wisdom. He appeared, too, on a more magnificent theatre of action, and has left the impress of his own peculiar character very deeply stamped upon the opinions and institutions of England and America.

Among the most remarkable peculiarities of his mind, was that singular inflexibility of which I have spoken; and he was in the habit of applying it indiscriminately to the noblest and to the most paltry uses. His range of knowledge was extensive: he had looked, with an observant eye, upon many forms of character and modes of life, and he deemed it to be his duty to declare his settled opinion upon every subject that fell in his way, and to take a part in every controversy as soon as it arose.

It mattered nothing, whether the subject was of little importance or of great, he was always stiff in his opinions, bold in his avowal of them, ready and copious in expounding them, and ingenious in their defence. Yet, in spite of these foibles, every ludicrous association is repelled from his character, by the admiration he excites when we behold him inculcating the purest doctrines of religion with the fervour of an apostle, and defending the dearest interests of his country and the most sacred rights of man with an ability, a courage, and a sagacity, which would have done honour to Hampden or Algernon Sidney.

He lived in an age of controversy and intolerance, both religious and political; and for a considerable part of his life, he published a polemical tract every month, and was regularly thrown into prison at least once a year. But neither tyranny nor the continual irritation of controversy, could change his steady character. Prosperous or un