The compact is celebrated which the persecuted and exiled Pilgrim Fathers concluded on board the Mayflower, November 11, 1620, before the founding of New Plymouth. Forty-one men on that occasion signed an act in which, for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and the honor of their king and country, they declare their purpose to found a colony. They thereupon mutually promised one another to unite themselves into a civil body politic, and, for the maintenance of good order and accomplishment of their proposed object, to make laws, to appoint officers, and to subject themselves to these.[75] Therewith began the series of "Plantation Covenants" which the English settlers, according to their ecclesiastical and political ideas, believed it necessary to make on founding a new colony. Here they are only to be considered in their connection with religious liberty. In 1629 Salem, the second colony in Massachusetts, was founded by Puritans. Unmindful of the persecutions they themselves had suffered in their native land, they turned impatiently against such as did not agree with them in their religious ideas. Roger Williams, a young Independent, landed in Massachusetts in 1631 and was at once chosen by the community in Salem to be its minister. But he preached complete separation of Church and State, and demanded absolute religious liberty, not only for all Christians but also for Jews, Turks, and heathen. They should have in the state equal civil and political rights with believers. A man's conscience belongs exclusively to him, and not to the state.[76] Exiled and in danger, Williams forsook Salem and with a faithful few founded, 1636, the city of Providence in the country of the Narragansett Indians, where all who were persecuted on account of their religion should find a refuge. In the original compact the seceders promised obedience to laws determined by a majority of themselves, but "only in civil things"--religion was to be in no way a subject of legislation.[77] Here for the first time was recognized the most unrestricted liberty of religious conviction, and that by a man who was himself glowing with religious feeling. Nineteen settlers from Providence in 1638 founded Aquedneck, the second colony in the present state of Rhode Island, after having concluded a most remarkable compact: "We whose names are underwritten do here solemnly, in the presence of Jehovah, incorporate ourselves into a Bodie Politik, and as he shall help, will submit our persons, lives and estates unto our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and to all those perfect and absolute laws of his given us in his holy word of truth, to be guided and judged hereby.--Exod. xxiv, 3, 4; 2 Chron. xi, 3; 2 Kings xi, 17."[78]