committee of the Convention of ’93 there put in an appearance. So far as dissent and the suspects were concerned, it meant the end. It is needless to revert to colonial records, and again to tell the story of what was then done. Mr. Lenthal appears to have been a worthy man and a devout minister of God’s word, as he read it; but he did differ from the powers that then were on certain abstract doctrines of baptism, re-ordination and justification by faith, whatever those terms may have signified. They have small meaning to us; but then, they implied heresy: and for heretics there was in 1638, and the years ensuing, no place in Massachusetts. He and his followers were summarily dealt with. Wise in his day and generation, Mr. Lenthal made haste to see the light, and to express a realizing sense of the error of his ways. He then took refuge in Rhode Island. His followers were sternly disciplined, reprimanded, threatened, fined, disfranchised, and “openly whipt.” The insubordination was crushed out; so also were freedom of speech and religious liberty. But order reigned in Weymouth; conformity was thenceforth there complete. The late Matthew Arnold was accustomed vigorously to declare that the great middle class of England, the kernel of the nation, was in Tudor times so disgusted with the cowled and tonsured Middle Ages that, during the first half of the seventeenth century, it “entered the prison house of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years.” The result was, he further declared, “a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.” Into the discussion which this utterance invites, I do not propose here to enter. I merely call attention to what all the study, investigation and thought of thirty years lead me to consider one of the most interesting and suggestive of the minor episodes of our early Massachusetts history, the final advance of the puritanical glacier over the last lingering vestige of an earlier attempt at a distinctly more cultured New England civilization. I institute no comparison; I make no criticism. To discuss the might-have-been is, to my mind, hardly worth while. I call attention only to one still unwritten page of our Massachusetts history; a page the existence as well as the possible meaning of which had altogether escaped me, if indeed it had even as yet glimmeringly dawned upon me, when I addressed you here in Weymouth in response to your invitation of thirty years ago.