How different was to be the future from what he imagined! He had yet to learn that here, in the wilds of New England, was a tyranny, in some respects as narrow as that of King Charles. Here, too, was unjust persecution very much like that from which he had fled. The Massachusetts Puritans who had left the mother country because they could not worship according to their consciences now refused to let others worship according to _their_ consciences. They who had been made to suffer for thinking as they pleased now caused their neighbors to suffer for the same reason. They held that while they had objected to the corruptions of the established church, now that a purer form of worship had taken its place, it must and should be supported. They had bitterly criticized the English Church, but nobody must criticize theirs! The accepted law was the Ten Commandments. These were divided into “two tables.” The first four, or those which summed up man’s duty to God, were the “first table,” while the remaining six, which covered the duties of man to man, were the “second table.” A person guilty of breaking any one of the Commandments was liable to be punished by the magistrates. The government of the colony was based upon the old Mosaic Law. Severe and heartless were the penalties meted out to offenders--often more severe and more heartless than those of England. Naturally the world had progressed during the hundreds of years that had elapsed since the rigid code of the Hebrew law-giver was in force. Into this narrow body of believers came Roger Williams, who was to become the “apostle of soul liberty.” From the very start, he was looked upon as a troublemaker. A Boston clergyman, Cotton Mather, writing about this period some years later, said that Roger Williams had a windmill in his head. “In the year 1654, a certain windmill in the Low Countries, whirling round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a violent storm then blowing, the stone at length by its rapid motion became so intensely hot as to fire the mill, from whence the flames, being dispersed by the high winds, did set a whole town on fire. But I can tell my reader that, about twenty years before this, there was a whole country in America like to be set on fire by the rapid motion of a windmill, in the head of one particular man.”