The Rogerene leaders appeared, in their writings, as consistent Christians, contending, by word and example, for the religion set forth in the New Testament, a religion depending not upon the observance of forms or of days, but upon love to God and the neighbor. They maintained that the civil government had no right to dictate in matters of religion; that the Christian church had but one lawgiver and judge, the Lord Himself. The divine commands regarding religion as set forth in the New Testament they would strictly obey, but they would, “for conscience’s sake,” obey no command of men in this regard. The purely civil laws they held themselves bound to observe, according to Christ’s command. Had Sunday laws been instituted for avowedly sanitary and moral purposes, and for the convenience and protection of church-going people, none would have conformed to such laws more conscientiously than the Rogerenes, such obedience being in the line of their preaching and practice regarding the civil laws. But because they were commanded to keep this day “sacred,” as a religious duty and necessity, and such observance was accounted a vital part of a religious life, they would not join in what seemed to them to be more of the nature of heathen idolatry than of the religion instituted by Jesus Christ. At a period when extreme regard for the first day “Sabbath” was one of the most readily accepted signs of a religious life, and no laws were more rigidly enforced than those which guarded that “sacred” day from desecration, the Rogerenes conscientiously ignored its sacredness. At a period when the materia medica was founded largely upon erroneous ideas and practices, when surgery was bungling and blundering and he who called a physician was, frequently, more liable to die of the so-called remedy than of the disease, the Rogerenes elected to trust their health and their lives to Nature and to Nature’s God, in the manner prescribed in the New Testament, and they appear to have profited by their choice.[1] At a period when no men were more in favor of war than those who preached—in parts—the gospel of Him who bade His followers to forgive their enemies, to love them and pray for them and to return good for evil, the Rogerenes stood for uniform peace and good will on the part of Christians, according to the spirit and the letter of the Master’s teachings. At a period when the law called upon all to support a state church, the Rogerenes refused to pay towards the support of a church of whose teachings they largely disapproved, or to either give or take anything for a ministry which Christ established as a free gift from those gifted by Him. Driven by the intolerance of their times to protect their obnoxious sect from extinction at the hands of powerful enemies, as best they could, the Rogerenes employed, at critical periods, a peaceable yet effective mode of defense, in the line of Gospel testimony, which enraged their opponents while it kept them fairly at bay.