The life of Roger Williams was surrounded with not a little of romance--the uncertainty of the date and place of his birth, his discovery and patronage by the eminent jurist, Sir Edward Coke, his unfortunate first-love experience, his migration to the wilderness of the new world, his expulsion by his companions from their primitive society, who found him a disturbing element by reason of his advanced political opinions, his retention of the esteem and friendship of some of the ablest men who drove him out because of his “pestilential doctrines,” as, for instance, the Winthrops, father and son, with whom he kept up an affectionate correspondence as long as he lived (more than one hundred of his letters to them have been preserved), and the remarkable success of his “lively experiment,” which has given to him an honored and conspicuous name with all modern historians and has exerted an influence upon human government which is rapidly encircling the globe. Roger Williams was charged by his Puritan neighbors with having “a windmill in his head.” Not only Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but the whole nation, from ocean to ocean, is now enjoying the priceless grist which that despised windmill ground out. It looks as if Roger Williams was fast coming into his own. Prof. Romeo Elton said in his “Life of Roger Williams,” published sixty-three years ago, “His property, his time and his talents were devoted to the promotion of the temporal and spiritual welfare of mankind, and in conducting to a glorious issue the struggle to unloose the bonds of the captive daughter of Zion.” Charles Francis Adams, in his “Massachusetts, its Historians and its History,” frankly declares, “Massachusetts, in the person of her ministers and magistrates, missed a great destiny by rejecting Roger Williams.” We of to-day undoubtedly look upon the Puritans with more charity and a greater appreciation of their spirit and excellences than did those of a former generation. We recognize their great virtues as well as their glaring faults. They were men of sterling character, of deep religious convictions, of willingness to make painful sacrifices for the sake of principle, of great reverence for the Bible and the institutions of religion, of purity of life in the home and in their social relations. They believed that religion was the supreme thing and that the commandments of God were of binding obligation upon all intelligent moral beings. They may have been too rigid in their interpretations and too severe in their application of religion to life and conduct, as, for example, in the observance of the Sabbath. But in our day of extreme and dangerous neglect men are saying, “There are some things that are worse than a Puritan Sabbath.” It might be well for modern life if we, the descendants of the Puritans, had inherited more of their virtues.