The Rev. Mr. Saltonstall began his ministry in New London in 1688, at the age of twenty-two. This was about twelve years after the prosecutions against the Rogers family, for non-conformity, had commenced. In 1691, he was ordained, and continued to preach until 1708, when he was chosen governor of the State and abandoned the ministry altogether. Bred in the narrow school of ecclesiasticism, and of a proud and dominant spirit, the day-star of religious liberty seems not even to have dawned upon his mind. He was virulent in his enmity to John Rogers from the beginning. The Furies have been said to relent; his rancor showed no abatement. In 1694, he presented charges of blasphemy against John Rogers, without the knowledge of the latter, and while he was confined in New London jail. We copy the following extract, from a statement made by John Rogers, Jr., writing in defence of his father, which shows how closely he was watched by his adversaries, that they might find grounds of accusation against him. Peter Pratt, of whom we shall say more hereafter, an author mainly quoted by historians on the subject we are discussing, in a pamphlet traducing the character of John Rogers, and written after his death, had said of his treatment in Hartford: “His whippings there were for most audacious contempt of authority; his sitting on the gallows was for blasphemous words.” To which John Rogers, Jr., thus replies:— First, he asserts that his whippings there—viz., at Hartford—“were for most audacious contempt of Authority”; but doth not inform the reader what the contempt was; making himself the judge, as well as the witness, whereas it was only his business to have proved what the contempt was, and to have left the judgment to the reader. And forasmuch as his assertion is altogether unintelligible, so may it reasonably be expected that my answer must be by supposition, and is as follows:— “I suppose he intends that barbarous cruelty which was acted on John Rogers, while he was a prisoner at Hartford, in the time of his long imprisonment above mentioned, which was so contrary to the laws of God and kingdom of England, that I never could find that they made a record of that matter, according to Christ’s words, John iii, 20, ‘For every one that doeth evil hateth the light,’ etc.