Finally, Williams was permitted to remain at Salem until the following spring, as the season then shivered on the verge of winter.[858] Then the Pilgrims grew alarmed; the reformer’s opinions were contagious; they thought, after all, that it would be best to send Williams home to England. A ship was about to sail; a warrant was issued; officers were despatched to arrest the disturber of that Israel. But on coming to his house and opening the door, they found “darkness there, and nothing more.” Roger Williams, apprized of the change of purpose, had quitted Salem “in winter snow and inclement weather.”[859] On, on he pressed, for Laud and the Tower of London were behind him. Without guide, without food, without shelter, he suffered tortures. “For fourteen weeks I was sorely tossed in a bitter season”—so he wrote in the evening of his life—“not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”[860] “But,” said he sweetly, “the ravens fed me in the wilderness;”[861] and he often made his habitation in the hollow of a tree. But nothing could daunt him. His cheerful faith, “Exempt from public haunt, Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.” So he fled on, on, through the snow, the darkness, the dreary forest; “fled from Christians to the savages, who knew and loved him, till at last he reached the kind-hearted but stupid Indian heathen Massasoit.”[862] This winter banishment of Roger Williams was cruel and bigoted, but it was not without palliation. He had run a tilt against the law and order of his time; he had sneered at the validity of the charter, then the fundamental law; he had impeached the theocracy; he had the dangerous advantage of being personally equipped with those gifts which win and “grapple to the soul with hooks of steel.” Every motive of worldly prudence seemed to dictate banishment. These things extenuate, but they do not excuse; because we are bound to impeach an untrue order. Paul cried, “God is God,” and trampled wicked laws beneath his feet. The catacombs of Pagan Rome were choked with martyrs who went against the law and order of their time. Huss and Wickliffe, Latimer and Ridley, violated law precisely as Roger Williams did. The law-breaker is not necessarily immoral and a pest. Society is bound to see that the statute-book does not fetter the human conscience. If society is recreant to its duty, individuals must not be false to God. Therefore, in this matter of opposing the colonial law, we hide Roger Williams behind the apostles, and enclose him within the leaves of the New Testament.