Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/120

 Massachusetts was not destined to remain long at any one time undisturbed by religious dissensions. Clark and Holmes, two leaders of the Anabaptist sectaries, were very active in their efforts to propagate their favorite tenets; and Clark, on one occasion, when in a church, having put on his hat to insult the minister as well as the people, was subjected to a severe flagellation. Quite a number of his followers were expelled from the colony. At this time, too, one Samuel Gorton, a religionist of rather an unusual stamp, afforded the authorities additional work in their endeavors to repress heterodoxy. Gorton entertained, it appears, certain mystical views of the doctrines of Scripture peculiar to himself; to him there was "no heaven but in the heart of a good man, no hell but in the conscience of the wicked;" he looked upon the doctrinal formulas and church ordinances of the orthodox Puritans as human inventions, alike unauthorized and mischievous, and regarded their assumed authority as an intolerable yoke of bondage, which he was daring enough to defy or ridicule. The "soul-tyranny" of the Massachusetts' theocracy seems indeed, as a natural result, invariably to have stimulated to opposition and defiance. Gorton expelled from Plymouth, retired to the neighborhood of Providence, where he became involved in further dispute with some of the inhabitants, who invited the interference of Massachusetts. He was cited to appear before the magistrates of Boston, but he preferred to retire still farther from their reach, and having purchased some land at Shawomet, of Miantonimoh, the .Narragansett chief, and the ally of the colonists in the Pequod war, commenced an independent settlement. The rightfulness of this grant of Miantonimoh's was denied by two inferior sachems; their appeal was confirmed by the Boston magistrates, to whom they now made over the disputed territory. Gorton was summoned to appear before the court at Boston; he replied with a denial of the jurisdiction of the "men of Massachusetts"—in which he was clearly in the right—and offered to submit the case to the arbitration of the other colonists. A strong party was sent out to seize him and his adherents, and being taken and conveyed to Boston, he was shortly after brought before the court on the charge of being a blasphemous subverter of "true religion and civil government." He vainly endeavored to explain away the obnoxious imputations, but was convicted, and together with many of his adherents, sentenced to death. This sentence was commuted, in 1644, and Gorton and his followers, subjected to imprisonment and hard labor during the winter, and mercilessly deprived of their cattle and stores, were, finally released and expelled. Gorton returned to England, but though he tried hard for many years, he was never able to obtain redress.

Miantonimoh, the Narragansett chief, was deadly hostile to Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegans. Having fallen into the hands of Uncas, he was, by advice of the Colonial