Roger Williams was an earnest seeker after truth. Like Robinson, he smiled at the idea that the acme of knowledge had been reached. He knew, moreover, that his goal was to be run for “not without toil and heat.” He was romantically conscientious; but he held to his opinions with grim determination, while the slowly-ripening principles of the English revolution of 1640 had already flowered in his brain. Now, in New England, he longed to set his ideas on two feet, and bid them run across the continent. Like all positive characters, the young Welchman speedily attracted attention and made himself felt. His clear, ringing heel had scarce sounded in Boston streets ere he was cordoned by friends and surrounded by foes.[820] His opinions were novel; some of them have been grafted into the fundamental law of our Republic, and are now justly considered the palladium of religious peace; others are still unsettled and partly unaccepted, being held by certain sects, and rejected by several as the _disjecta membra_ of divinity; but to the Pilgrims they were alike odious and revolutionary. But the principle upon which hangs his immortality of fame is that of complete toleration. “He was a Puritan, and a fugitive from English persecution,” remarks Bancroft, “but his wrongs had not clouded his accurate understanding. In the capacious recesses of his mind he had revolved the nature of intolerance, and he, and he alone, had arrived at the grand principle which is its sole effectual remedy. He announced his discovery under the simple proposition of the sanctity of conscience. The civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control opinion; should punish guilt, but never violate the freedom of the soul. The doctrine contained within itself an entire reformation of theological jurisprudence; it would blot from the statute-book the felony of non-conformity; would quench the fires that persecution had so long kept burning; would repeal every law compelling attendance on public worship; would abolish tithes and all forced contributions to the maintenance of religion; would give an equal protection to every form of religious faith; and never suffer the authority of civil government to be enlisted against the mosque of the Mussulman, or the altar of the fire-worshipper; the Jewish synagogue, or the Roman cathedral. It is wonderful with what distinctness Roger Williams deduced these inferences from his central tenet, the consistency with which, like Pascal and Edwards, those bold and profound reasoners on other subjects, he accepted every fair inference from his doctrine, and the circumspection with which he repelled every unjust imputation. In the unwavering assertion of these views he never changed his position; the sanctity of conscience was the great tenet, which, with all its consequences, he defended as he first trod the shores of New England; and in his extreme old age it was the last pulsation of his heart. But it placed the