“4th. The persons, all beside myself, are women and children, on whom little help, now their minds lie under the actual stroke of affliction and grief. My wife is sick, and my youngest child extremely so, and hath been for months, so that we dare not carry him out of doors, yet much worse now than before.... Myself will willingly bow my neck to any yoke of personal denial, for I know for what and for whom, by grace I suffer.” [Footnote: _History of Harvard_, i. 18.] He had before asked Winthrop to cause the government to pay him what it owed, and he ended his prayer in these words: “Considering the poverty of the country, I am willing to descend to the lowest step; and if nothing can comfortably be allowed, I sit still appeased; desiring nothing more than to supply me and mine with food and raiment.” [Footnote: _Idem_, i. 20.] He received that mercy which the church has ever shown to those who wander from her fold; he was given till March, and then, with dues unpaid, was driven forth a broken man, to die in poverty and neglect. But Jonathan Mitchell, pondering deeply upon the wages he saw paid at his very hearthstone, to the sin of his miserable old friend, snatched his own soul from Satan’s jaws. And thenceforward his path lay in pleasant places, and he prospered exceedingly in the world, so that “of extream lean he grew extream fat; and at last, in an extream hot season, a fever arrested him, just after he had been preaching.... Wonderful were the lamentations which this deplorable death fill’d the churches of New England withal.... Yea ... all New England shook when that pillar fell to the ground.” [Footnote: _Magnalia_, bk. 4, ch. iv. Section 16.] Notwithstanding, therefore, clerical promises of gentleness, Massachusetts was not a comfortable place of residence for Baptists, who, for the most part, went to Rhode Island; and John Clark [Footnote: For sketch of Clark’s life see _Allen’s Biographical Dictionary_.] became the pastor of the church which they formed at Newport about 1644. He had been born about 1610, and had been educated in London as a physician. In 1637 he landed at Boston, where he seems to have become embroiled in the Antinomian controversy; at all events, he fared so ill that, with several others, he left Massachusetts ‘resolving, through the help of Christ, to get clear of all [chartered companies] and be of ourselves.’ In the course of their wanderings they fell in with Williams, and settled near him. Clark was perhaps the most prominent man in the Plantations, filled many public offices, and was the commissioner who afterward secured for the colony the famous charter that served as the State Constitution till 1842.