Samuell Gorton was a man of a profoundly religious nature. His views, have been little studied, and have been greatly misunderstood, both by his contemporaries and the historians of later generations. John Fiske dismisses him with a sentence, in his admirable School History of the United States, as “a man of queer ideas.” The more extended reference of this fair-minded historian, in his “Beginnings of New England,” hardly does justice either to Gorton’s political sagacity, or to the remarkable character of his religious opinions. Charles Francis Adams, in his monograph on “Massachusetts, its Historians and its History,” alludes to Samuell Gorton as a “crude and half-crazy thinker.” His contemporaries in Massachusetts assailed him with a choice collection of opprobrious epithets in the place of arguments: he was an “arch-heretic,” a “beast,” a “miscreant,” a “proud and pestilent seducer,” a “most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties.”[68] Edward Rawson, some time Secretary of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the ancestor of my own children,—a man capable of making vigorous use of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon of the period, albeit not always grammatically, denounces him as “a man whose spirit was stark drunk with blasphemies and insolences, a corrupter of the truth, a disturber of the peace wherever he comes;” and his contemporary, Nathaniel Morton, with whom he conducted an animated correspondence, says he “was deeply leavened with blasphemous and familistical opinions.” In so far as his religious views have received attention in recent years, they have been mainly studied in their incomplete and incidental expression in some of his published works, “Simplicities Defence Against Seven-Headed Policie,” and “The Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalme,” the main object of which was political and polemical rather than expository of his system of thought. The involved style and quaint and mystical phraseology have repelled the modern student, and prevented a clear understanding of his theological doctrines.