The inhabitants of New London plantation were not sinners above other men. At the time James Rogers, senior, his wife, sons and daughters were thrust into prison in New London, John Bunyan was held in jail in England and said he would stay there till the moss grew over his eyebrows, before he would deny his convictions or cease to promulgate them. In the light of to-day, neither of these committed any offense whatever. Hundreds of the best of men suffered in like manner in England, and for a long period of time; and some were given over to death. The reverend father of Archbishop Leighton was, for conscience’s sake, held imprisoned for more than twelve years, and not released until his faculties, both of body and mind, were seriously impaired. Rev. John Cotton, one of Boston’s earliest preachers, came out of prison to this country. Religious thought was drenched, so to speak, with false notions, and many, even of those who had escaped from persecution in the Old World, became persecutors in the New. Great praise is due to such men as Roger Williams, who fled from Salem to the wilderness to escape banishment for his principles, hibernating among Indians “without bed or board,” as he expressed it, and whose ultimate settlement in Rhode Island made that State the field of religious liberty. Equal praise is due to John Rogers and his associates, at a later day, for boldly enunciating the same principles, and bravely suffering in their defense, ploughing the rough soil of Connecticut and sowing the good seed there. Nor was the treatment of the Rogerenes comparable for cruelty with that of the Quakers at Boston, a few years prior to the Rogers movement. We hear nothing of the cutting off of ears, boring the tongue with a red-hot iron, banishment, selling into slavery or punishment by death, which disgraced the civilization of the Massachusetts colony and which was Puritanism with a vengeance, almost leading us to sympathize with their persecutors in England. New London plantation was disgraced by no such heathenism as this. St. Paul boasted that he was a citizen of no mean city. We shall find that the Rogerenes are of no mean descent, sneered at and held in derision though they have been, by men of superficial thought. James Rogers, senior, a prosperous and esteemed business man of Milford, Conn., had dealings in New London as early as 1656, and soon after became a resident. Says Miss Caulkins:—