Like the rest of his suffering brethren, Roger Williams was a Puritan, and fled to America to escape persecution. Unlike them, however, amid the afflictions of persecution he had attained to a profound knowledge, either through the grasp of a great intellect, or the single-mindedness of a child-like spirit, both of which were portions of his character. He saw that the office of civil magistrate was to restrain crime, not to control opinion; to punish guilt, not to violate the freedom of the human soul. Arrived in Massachusetts, he found the churches there not free as the gospel would make them; and great was the excitement produced by the doctrines which he promulgated—“the ill-egg of toleration,” as it was now termed. Nevertheless the people of Salem invited him to become their minister, at which the court of Boston “marvelled,” and before long his friends at Salem were required to give him up. He then withdrew to Plymouth, whence after two years he was recalled to Salem by those who could never forget his mild virtues and his great doctrines. Controversy on controversy succeeded; the magistrates asserted their laws of intolerance, insisted on the presence of every man at public worship, in the very spirit of that intolerant and legislative religion which had driven them from their native land. Williams stood forth as the unflinching champion of religious liberty, of the sanctity of opinion and the freedom of the human mind, and as the bold assailant of soul-oppression, “the removal of which yoke,” said he, “will prove an act of righteousness to the enslaved nations.” Besides these doctrines, he so steadfastly maintained the original right of the Indians to their land, that he even questioned the validity of any grant of their territory from an English monarch to his subjects.