Next, a law was framed which forbade arbitrary taxation; it was decreed that “the deputies alone were competent to grant land or raise money.”[812] Already “the state was filled with the bane of village politicians; ‘the freemen of every town in the Bay were busy in inquiring into their liberties.’ With the important exception of universal suffrage, in our age so happily in process of complete establishment, representative democracy was as perfect two centuries ago as it is to-day. Even the magistrates who acted as judges held their office by annual popular election. ‘Elections cannot be safe there long,’ sneered an English lawyer, Leckford, with a shrug. The same prediction has been made these two hundred years. The public mind, in perpetual agitation, is still easily shaken, even by slight and transient impulses; but after all its vibrations, it follows the laws of the moral world and safely recovers its balance.”[813] The test of citizenship was indeed exclusive. But the conception which based the ballot on goodness of the highest type, goodness of such purity and force that nothing save faith in Christ could create it—which conferred political power on personal character, was noble, even while impracticable. But God commissioned an American reformer to plant the seed of a larger growth by a vehement and potent protest. CHAPTER XXVII. ROGER WILLIAMS. “I venerate the man whose heart is warm, Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life, Coincident, exhibit lucid proof That he is honest in the sacred cause.” COWPER’S _Task_. The Pilgrim Fathers were enamoured of the Mosaic code. They esteemed it to be a diamond without a flaw. Their constant, persistent effort was to naturalize the Jewish ritual in New England. For this their statesmen planned and their divines dogmatized. They did not remember that the judicial government which fitted the world in its infancy had been outgrown, and now sat awkwardly upon Christendom twenty-one years of age. They did not remember that Christ had “rung out” the old dispensation and “rung in” a grander and broader one.