Thomas Hooker died in 1647, as the work of the synod was beginning, and John Winthrop in 1649, as it was ending. There is no comparison in the debt that the political thought of America owes to the two men, whose ideas have already been contrasted on an earlier page. Hooker led the way along which the people of the United States were to follow, while Winthrop was engaged in the attempt to found a state in a politically impossible form. In spite of his inestimable services in the beginnings of the colony, there was no originality in his contribution to thought, and his subservience to the demands of the theocracy had been foreshadowed by his statement in early manhood that he so honored a faithful minister that he “could have kissed his feet.”[651] Of high nobility of character, gentle, forgiving, frequently kindest to those from whom he differed most, there was little in his nature of the born persecutor. Led into acts of intolerant zeal by the ministers whom he so devoutly followed, there is considerable probability in the story related by Hutchinson, that when on his death-bed, being pressed by Dudley to sign a warrant for the banishment of a heretic, he refused, saying that “he had done too much of that work already.”[652] His portrait depicts a face of gentleness rather than of strength. His unquestioned integrity, his modesty, and his self-sacrificing devotion to the interests of the colony as he saw them, amply fulfilled the high opinion which the original undertakers of the enterprise had formed of him, although, as in the case of most of the leaders, the effect upon mind and character of the transplanting to America was not wholly a happy one. “He was of a more catholic spirit than some of his brethren before he left England,” wrote Hutchinson; “but afterward he grew more contracted, and was disposed to lay too great stress upon indifferent matters.”[653] Footnote 651: R. C. Winthrop, _J. Winthrop_, vol. I, p. 61. Footnote 652: Hutchinson, _History_, vol. I, p. 142. Footnote 653: Hutchinson, _History_, vol. I, p. 142.