In 1651, some time after his trial at Plymouth, Mr. Holmes was arrested, with Mr. Clarke, of Newport, and Mr. Crandall, for preaching and worshiping God with some of their brethren at Lynn. They were condemned by the Court at Boston to suffer fines or whippings. Holmes refused to pay the fine, and would not allow his friends to pay it for him, saying that "to pay it would be acknowledging himself to have done wrong, whereas his conscience testified that he had done right." He was accordingly punished with thirty lashes from a three-corded whip, with such severity, says Governor Jenks, "that in many days, if not some weeks, he could take no rest but as he lay upon his knees and elbows, not being able to suffer any part of his body to touch the bed whereon he lay." Soon after this, Holmes and his followers moved to Newport, and on the death of the Reverend Mr. Clarke, in 1652, he succeeded him as pastor of the First Baptist Church in that time. Mr. Holmes died at Newport in 1682, aged seventy-six years. The persecution offered to the Rehoboth Baptists scattered their church, but did not destroy their principles. Facing the obloquy attached to their cause, and braving the trials imposed by the civil and ecclesiastical powers, they must wait patiently God's time of deliverance. That their lives were free from guile, none claim. That their cause was righteous, none will deny; and while the elements of a Baptist church were thus gathering strength on this side of the Atlantic, a leader was prepared for them, by God's providence, on the other. In the same year that Obadiah Holmes and his band established their church in Massachusetts, in opposition to the Puritan order, Charles I, the great English traitor, expiated his "high crimes and misdemeanors" on the scaffold, at the hands of a Puritan Parliament. Then followed the period of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and then the Restoration, when "there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph." The Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, under the sanction of Charles II, though a fatal blow at the purity and piety of the English Church, was a royal blessing to the cause of religion in America. Two thousand bravely conscientious men, who feared God more than the decrees of Pope, King, or Parliament, were driven from their livings and from the kingdom. What was England's great loss was America's great gain, for a grand tidal wave of emigration swept westward across the Atlantic to our shores. Godly men and women, clergy and laity, made up this exiled band, too true and earnest to yield a base compliance to the edict of conformity. For thirteen years here the Dissenters from Mr. Newman's church waited for a spiritual guide, but not in vain.