Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/150



UR Pilgrim and Puritan ancestry, the founders of Boston and Salem and Weymouth and Plymouth, came to America for several good and sufficient reasons; the principal one was to find comfortable rest from the deep political and religious unrest of the mother-land. Spiritually they had found an enlightenment above most of their fellow countrymen, and finding themselves growing out of sympathy with what was transpiring about them, they looked about for a city of refuge to which to flee. Men they were with a new revelation, heretics if you please, honest, sincere, devout, godly, and tremendously in earnest. John Milton and Oliver Cromwell belonged to their order; so did Harry Vane, once Governor of Massachusetts, the defender of Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, who suffered death at the Restoration, with Hugh Peters, once the minister at Salem and one of the founders of Harvard College. These early New England people wished, as they thought they had a right, to be let alone as