Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Massachusetts Records of 4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement to take the oath is offered by making the regulations for recording the lands of freemen apply also to the lands of "residents" presumably not church members and ineligible to the franchise, but only to the residents "that had taken or shall hereafter take their oathes." Backus supposes that Williams saw some incidental result from the oath that would be prejudicial to religious freedom. This is to suppose that Williams needed a practical consideration to stir him to action--it is to suppose that Williams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the independence of Massachusetts would be lost; Roger Williams was only afraid that Massachusetts would commit a public sin in trying to escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled was his objective point in private and public life; safety, public or private, was secondary. [Sidenote: Note 12, page 292.] There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by Cotton first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court since, to prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a cause of his banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, the decree would have been more comprehensible and defensible in view of the opinions of the age. But the question about the validity of the patent, the question of the protest written against the course of the magistrates in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to support him, the question of the freeman's oath, and, what seems to have been deemed of capital importance, the question of grace after meat, are all involved at one time or another. The formal charges in what may be considered the beginning of the banishment proceedings, the trial in July, as given by Winthrop, our most trustworthy authority, are: 1. That the magistrates ought not to punish for a religious offense--"the breach of the first table"--except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2. That the magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 4. That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after meat. Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings in October, the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to Salem its outlying land entered into and embittered the controversy. Winthrop, i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the divulging "of dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against the aucthoritie of the magistrate" the first offense, and the "letter of defamacion" the second. Williams says that a magistrate, who appears to have been Haynes, the governor, summed up his offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four heads: 1. The denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of the lawfulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray. 3. The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in England. 4.