Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/153

Rh sincere, pure, without adulteration. The Bible was the best Statute Book for the Puritan; and Puritan divines, well educated and learned, must be its supreme legal expounders. Hence Harvard College with its motto "Christo et Ecclesiae," where godly men should be taught doctrine and duty so that they in their turn should guide the brethren to intelligent convictions and a vigorous defence of the same.

With such conceptions of the state as a divine institution, after the Mosaic fashion of the Hebrew commonwealth, which they so carefully studied and patterned, it is not strange to see what was the most natural thing for them to do—the very thing we are doing every day, namely, resist the incoming of dangerous elements and the proper education and discipline, if need be, of the intractible and incorrigible, already within the fold of the Commonwealth. According to Puritan standards, the Baptist, the Quaker, and other dissentients had better stay at home on the English side of the Atlantic, for all concerned, but once here they must hold their tongues or have them held by Puritan nippers.

The act of banishment which severed Roger Williams from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 was the means of advancing rather than hindering, the spread of the so-called heresies which he so bravely advocated. As the persecutions which drove the disciples of Christ from Jerusalem were the means of extending the cause of Christianity, so the principles of toleration and soul-liberty were strengthened by opposition, in the mind of this apostle of freedom of conscience in the new world. His Puritan birth and education made him a bold and earnest advocate of whatever truth his conscience approved, and he went everywhere "preaching the word" of individual freedom. The sentence of exile could not silence his tongue, nor destroy his influence. "The divers new and dangerous opinions" which he had "broached and divulged," though hostile to the notions of the clergy and the authorities of Massachusetts Bay, were at the same time quite acceptable to a few brave souls, who