The first public expression of the hostility he was to encounter came from the magistrates of Boston within two months after his arrival, and, on the very day on which the church of Salem had installed him as assistant to their aged pastor, Mr. Skelton. The magistrates were a powerful body, and before autumn he found his situation so uncomfortable that he removed to Plymouth, where the rights of individual opinion were held in respect, if not fully acknowledged. Here, while assiduously engaged in the functions of his holy office, he was brought into direct contact with several of the most powerful chiefs of the neighboring tribes of Indians, and among them of Massasoit and Miantonomi, who were to exercise so controlling an influence over his fortunes. His fervent spirit caught eagerly at the prospect of bringing them under Christian influences, and his natural taste for the study of languages served to lighten the labor of preparation. "God was pleased," he wrote many years afterwards, "to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy holes, even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem, to gain their tongue; my soul's desire was to do the natives good." This was apparently the calmest period of his stormy career. It was at Plymouth that his first child, a daughter, was born. But although he soon made many friends, and had the satisfaction of knowing that his labors were successful, his thoughts still turned towards Salem, and, receiving an invitation to resume his place as assistant of Mr. Skelton, whose health was on the wane, he returned thither after an absence of two years. Some of the members of his church had become so attached to him that they followed him to the sister colony. And now came suspicions which quickly ripened into controversies, and before another two years were over led to what he regarded as persecution, but what the rulers of the Bay Colony held to be the fulfillment of the obligation which they had assumed in adopting the whole Bible as their rule of life. In 1635 he was banished from the colony by a solemn sentence of the General Court, for teaching: "1st. That we have not our land by Pattent from the King, but that the natives are the true owners of it, and that we ought to repent of such receiving it by Pattent. 2d. That it is not lawful to call a wicked person to swear, to pray, as being actions of God's worship. 3d. That it is not lawful to heare any of the Ministers of the Parish Assemblies in England. 4th. That the civil magistrates power extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward state of man." For us who read these charges with the light of two more centuries of progress upon them, it seems strange that neither the General Court nor Williams himself should have perceived that the only one wherein civilization was interested was that to which they have assigned the least conspicuous place. CHAPTER II.