Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/49

 1631-6] Religious difficulties. 17 energetic and attractive young preacher, Roger Williams. Soon after his landing he was chosen minister of Salem. It is clear that his gifts were marred by that imperfect sense of proportion which makes a man fight with as much asperity for trifles and formalities as for vital questions. He differed as widely from the orthodox school of Massachusetts as they did from the Church of England. He held in an extreme form the doctrine, utterly repudiated by Puritan teachers as a whole, that the secular power must not control or in any way meddle with religion. He was not inaptly called by one of his opponents, "a haberdasher of small questions against the power." Beside denying the authority of the colonial government in the sphere of religion, he seemed likely by his ill-timed zeal to embroil the colony with the Crown. He denied the validity of the charter, on the ground that the King of England had no right to grant away the territory of the Indian. Moreover, at his instigation, Endecott mutilated the royal ensign by cutting the cross out of the flag used by the local train-band at Salem. In October, 1635, Williams was brought before the General Court of the colony, and, refusing to retract, was banished. He left the colony, and proceeded with a party of some twenty disciples to form a settlement to the south in Narragansett Bay. The Court, deeming this a dangerous proceeding, strove to arrest him, but failed. His success as the founder of a new colony will come before us again. The rulers of Massachusetts had good reason for wishing to avoid being committed to anything like an unprovoked declaration of dis- loyalty. Massachusetts was endangered by the hostility of those who had suffered from the severity of her government and of those who saw in her existence a menace to civil and religious order. In 1633 the three chief members of the Company in England were brought before the Privy Council and interrogated as to the conduct of the colony. Next year emigrants to New England were required to take the oath of allegiance and to promise conformity with the Prayer-book. In the same year a royal commission of twelve, with Laud at its head, was appointed to administer the affairs of the colonies. So alarmed were the settlers at these tidings that they appointed military commissioners and made provision for fortifying Dorchester, Charlestown, and Castle Island in Boston Bay. So far the authorities of the colony had only been brought into conflict with individuals. Their next strife was one of a different kind, one which seemed to threaten civil and ecclesiastical disruption. In 1635 the colony received a notable recruit in Henry Vane. In the following year there came to Boston a clergyman, John Wheelwright, who had been silenced in England, and with him his sister, Mrs Hutchinson, an acute and singularly resolute woman with a passion for theological controversy. The brother and sister taught doctrines whose divergence from the accepted creed can only be understood after a careful C. M. H. VII. CH. I. 2