Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/161

 from the Rehoboth Church, a part of whom aided in establishing the church in Swansea, Mass., occurred in the same year, 1649.

During the Protectorate of Cromwell, all dissenters enjoyed the largest liberty of conscience in the mother land, and, as a result, the Church at Swansea, Wales, grew from forty-eight to three hundred souls. Around this centre of influence sprang up several branch churches, and pastors were raised up to care for them. Mr. Myles soon became the leader of his denomination in Wales, and in 1651 he was sent as a representative of all the Baptist Churches in Wales to the Baptist Ministers' meeting, at Glazier's Hall, London, with a letter, giving an account of the peace, union, and increase of work. As a preacher and worker he had no equal in that country, and his zeal enabled him to establish many new churches in his native land. The act of the English Saint Bartholomew's Day, in 1662, deprived Mr. Myles of the support which the government under Cromwell had granted him, and he, with many others, chose the freedom of exile to the tyranny of an unprincipled monarch. It would be interesting for us to give an account of his leave taking of his church at Swansea, and of his associates in Christian labor, and to trace out his passage to Massachusetts, and to relate the circumstances which led him to search out and to find the little band of Baptists at Rehoboth. Surely some law of spiritual gravitation or affinity, under the good hand of God, thus raised up and brought this under-shepherd to the flock thus scattered in the wilderness.

Nicholas Tanner, Obadiah Brown, John Thomas, and others, accompanied Mr. Myles in his exile from Swansea, Wales. The first that is known of them in America was the formation of a Baptist Church at the house of John Butterworth, in Rehoboth. Mr. Myles and his followers had probably learned at Boston, or at Plymouth, of the treatment offered to Holmes and his party ten years before, and his sympathies led him to seek out and unite the elements which persecution had scattered. Seven members made up this