Mr. Williams probably preached this doctrine at Salem, and Mr. Endicott deemed it his duty, as a magistrate, to remove from the colors the cross, which was the favorite symbol of Popery.[73] Dr. Bentley asserts, that Mr. Williams was the “_innocent_, though the _real_ cause of it.”[74] Mr. Endicott was summoned before the Court, admonished, and declared incapable, for one year, of holding any public office, as a punishment for the act; but neither he, nor the Court, appear to have attributed any blame to Mr. Williams, which we may, without a want of charity, suppose they would have done, if there had been any reasonable pretence. CHAPTER V. Proceedings which led to his banishment—freeman’s oath—various charges against him—sentence—birth of his second child—leaves Salem for Narraganset Bay—review of the causes of his banishment. We will now proceed to narrate the measures which issued in the banishment of Mr. Williams. We shall follow the guidance of Winthrop, as to the facts, because this truly great man wrote without the angry temper which most of the early writers on the subject exhibited. “1634, Nov. 27. The Court was informed, that Mr. Williams, of Salem, had broken his promise to us, in teaching publicly against the King’s patent, and our great sin in claiming right thereby to this country, &c. and for usual terming the churches of England antichristian. We granted summons to him for his appearance at the next Court.” Winthrop, vol. i. p. 151. We are not informed of the terms of Mr. Williams’ promise, here referred to, and cannot decide how far he had broken it. The epithet which he is said to have applied to the churches in England, might, in his judgment, have been well deserved by many of them. He, of course, referred to the established churches, then practising, as the Puritans believed, idolatrous ceremonies, and under the direction of wicked men. Mr. Cotton, in his “Bloody Tenet Washed,” (p. 109) acknowledges it to be a source of grief to himself and others, “that there is yet so much of those notorious evils still continuing in the parishes, (in England) worldliness, ignorance, superstition, scoffing, swearing, cursing, whoredom, drunkenness, theft, lying; I may add, also, murder, and malignity against the godly, suffered to thrust themselves into the fellowship of the churches, and to sit down with the saints at the Lord’s table.” We may be allowed to think, that Roger Williams was not remarkably bigoted, if he did call such churches as these antichristian, and deem it a sin to hold fellowship with them. He obeyed the summons of the Court: