There are volcanoes in nature; may there not be such in the moral world? Who knows but they are safety valves to the whole system. It cannot be denied that the church gave ample and repeated occasion to call from these reformers something more than the sound of the lute. These moral upheavings must tend to a sublime end, and like adversity have their sweet uses. We are now breathing the fragrance of the flower planted in the dark soil of those turbulent times. Of the Puritanism of New England, we must say it is bespattered with many a blot, which ought not to be passed over with zephyrs of praise. “Fair weather cometh out of the north. Men see not the bright light in the cloud. The wind passeth over and cleanseth them.” Let us revere the names of all who, in the face of suffering and loss, have dared to stand up boldly in truth’s defence. To impress men to haul an apostle of liberty from jail to jail, break into the sanctity of family relations, imprison fathers and mothers, purloin their property, for no just cause whatever, leaving their children to cry in the streets for bread, and this under the cloak of religion, is an offence incomparably greater than to make one’s voice heard in vindication of truth, even in a meeting-house. The offences of John Rogers, whatever they may have been, encountering opposition with opposition, in which facts were the only swords, and words the only lash, are as insignificant as the fly on the elephant’s back compared with the treatment that he and his followers received from those who had fled from persecution in the Old World to stain their own hands with like atrocities in the New. Of the almost unprecedented suffering and cruelties which John Rogers endured for conscience’s sake, and in the cause of religious freedom, for many years, and particularly of his confinement in the Hartford prison, he here tells the story, written by himself about twelve years after his release from that prison. See “Midnight Cry,” pages 4-16:— _Friends and Brethren_:— I have found it no small matter to enter in at the straight gate and to keep the narrow way that leads unto life; for it hath led me to forsake a dear wife and children, yea, my house and land and all my worldly enjoyment, and not only so, but to lose all the friendships of the world, yea, to bury all my honor and glory in the dust, and to be counted the off-scouring and filth of all things; yea, the straight and narrow way hath led me into prisons, into stocks and to cruel scourgings, mockings and derision, and I could not keep in it without perfect patience under all these things; for through much tribulation must we enter into the kingdom of God.