Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/157

 saying that, "to pay it would be acknowledging himself to have done wrong," whereas his conscience testified that he had done right, and he durst not accept deliverance in such a way. "He was accordingly punished with thirty lashes from a three-corded whip, on Boston Common, with such severity, says Governor Jencks, "that in many days, if not some weeks, he could take no rest but as he lay upon his knees and elbows, not being able to suffer any part of his body to touch the bed whereon he lay." "You have struck me with roses,"he said to his tormentors. Soon after this. Holmes and his followers moved to Newport, and, on the death of Rev. Mr. Clarke, in 1676, he succeeded him as pastor of the First Baptist Church in that town. Mr. Holmes died at Newport in 1682, aged seventy-six years.

The persecution offered to the Rehoboth Baptists, scattered their church, but did not destroy their principles. Facing the obloquy attached to their cause, and braving the trials imposed by the civil and ecclesiastical powers, they must wait patiently God's time of deliverance. That their lives were free from guile none claim. That their cause was righteous, none will deny, and while the elements of a Baptist Church were thus gathering strength and purification on this side of the Atlantic, a leader was preparing for them, by God's providence, on the other. In the same year that Obadiah Holmes and his band separated from the Rehoboth church, in opposition to the Puritan order, Charles the First, the great English traitor, expiated his "high crimes and misdemeanors"on the scaffold at the hands of a Puritan Parliament. Then followed the period of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and then the Restoration, when "there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph."The Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, under the sanction of Charles the Second, though a severe blow at the purity and piety of the English church, was a royal blessing to the cause of religion in America. Two thousand bravely conscientious men, who feared God more than the decrees of the Pope, King or Parliament, were driven from