The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder
of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the
remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of
the Roman churches. Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle,
advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced.
Stoughton, who had denied that the "assistants" of a corporation were
scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he
retracted. Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last.
The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its
ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leadership,
protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of
spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were
now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic
violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem. He
was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift
conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the
same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and
Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the
heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the
"rockie strength" of his opinions in spite of penalties and
majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first
blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the
commonwealth.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Williams's trial.]
[Sidenote: Note 12.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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