night in a deserted wigwam, there was a sensation of a half-public character. That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, and that the puny mouse had triumphed at last, was in one budget of traveling news that came to Boston. To this event an ominous significance was given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, maker of anagrams, solemn utterer of rhyming prophecies which were sometimes fulfilled, and general theological putterer. Wilson made the snake represent the devil, according to all sound precedents; the mouse was the feeble church in the wilderness, to which God would give the victory over Satan. Thus enhanced by an instructive interpretation from the prophet and seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its travels once more, and now with its hopeful exegesis on its back. The Massachusetts mouse was an auspicious creature; it is recorded by the governor, and it was no doubt told along the coast, that one got into a library and committed depredations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling every leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared a Greek Testament and a Psalter in the same covers. In a petty state with a range of intellectual interests so narrow, the conflict between Williams and the General Court took place. VI. [Sidenote: Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community.] [Sidenote: Note 7.] It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God--the God who led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers--the Dutch in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders, with their admixture of papists--they looked with condescension if not with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World. The settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history; that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands of New England. The theocratical government was thought to be the one most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off image worship. [Sidenote: John Cotton, 1633.] [Sidenote: Note 8.]