solencies, that he was then whipped and sent out of that colony." He then repaired to the Providence Plantations, where he committed such outrages, that Mr. Williams and his people entreated the Massachusetts government for protection from Gorton and his outlaws. The result of this application was, that Gorton was banished again.

Now Williams was an offender of the same class with the "Gortonists; " and the laws under which he had suffered some seven years before, were the same laws which he waked up against that crazy crew. If it was right for him to procure the banishment of Gorton, then was it right for the people of Massachusetts to exclude Mr. Williams from their community. He has afforded the strongest practical proof of the necessity of such legislation in the circumstances of the infant colonies. "And against necessity, there is no law." As Seneca has said ;-" Necessity excuses whatever it exacts."

No man can say, what the consequences would have been, had Mr. Williams remained in Massachusetts, to leaven the people with his incongruous mixture of sound sentiments and fantastical opinions. The character of the man has left its impress upon the genius of the people of Rhode Island. The demonstrations of

the mob-spirit there and in Pennsylvania, have been regarded by judicious persons as the natural result when a people has been extensively pervaded by the non-resistant leaven. After a while, that leaven will pass from the vinous to the acetous fermentation. Its repugnance to the divine ordinance of magistracy and lawful order will remain, and will operate with explosive violence, whenever the counteracting repugnance to the use of physical force shall have evaporated and passed away. Every community which is not trained to venerate the law and its ministers, must have a strong tendency to anarchy and confusion.

The course pursued by our fathers has been amply vindicated by those best able to judge of its propriety. Among others, we may refer to one whom it is needless to style the honorable John Quincy Adams. In a discourse recently published by him, after a candid recital of the insurrectionary spirit and intolerable proceedings of Mr. Williams at Salem, he asks;— "Can we blame the founders of the Massachusetts colony for banishing him from within their jurisdiction? In the annals of religious persecution, is there to be found a martyr more gently dealt with by those against whom he began the war of intolerance? whose authority he per

sisted, even after professions of penitence and submission, in defying, till deserted even by the wife of his bosom? and whose utmost severity of punishment upon him was only an order for his removal as a nuisance from among them?"* Let newspaper witlings scribble as they may, their detractions cannot blast the memory of the men whom "the sage of Quincy" has thus frankly justified.

Our fathers have been severely rebuked for not tolerating the Baptists at their first appearance among us. No one has undertaken to apologize for them in this matter. And yet, in addition to the general considerations already advanced, there are such as greatly alleviate the blame which may attach to their treatment of a sect now so respectable.

It had never been known as an organized body till the rise of the Anabaptists in Germany, in the sixteenth century. They who have read the history of that period are well aware, that, in all the fury of fanaticism, that sect waged a wild crusade against every government which would not join them, laying waste the country,

* The New England Confederacy of MDCXLIII. A Discourse de. livered before the Mass. Hist. Soc. 1843. pp. 25-30.

and giving themselves up to the most shocking excesses, till they were with difficulty suppressed and dispersed. This is no place to recount the horrors they enacted. We are unwilling to dwell upon them. Suffice it to say, that our fathers, in whose memory these tragedies were fresh, regarded an Anabaptist even as Edmund Burke would have regarded a French Jacobin reeking from the atrocities of "the reign of terror." Now this infelicity attending the origin of the Baptists as a distinct denomination, occasioned them, at the first forming of their churches in Britain, which was about the time of the settlement of this country, to be regarded with extreme anxiety and foreboding of direful results. Though these dark suspicions have proved to be groundless and unjust, yet, under the circumstances, they were very natural; and it is not strange, that the Baptists were subjected to strong opposition from such as feared that they would walk in the bloody tracks of their German predecessors. Thus one of the historians speaks of the laws made to restrain their proceedings, in these terms;"The General Court were so afraid lest matters might at last, from small beginnings, grow into a new Munster tragedy, that they enacted some laws to restrain anabaptist exorbitances;

which laws, though never executed unto the extremity of them, yet were soon laid by, as to any execution of them at all.” *

This explanation has been boldly denied by some, who maintain, that the Baptists were too well known as to their principles and temper, to leave them liable to such suspicions. It is certain, however, that, though the German anabaptists had been for near a century endeavoring to spread their sentiments in Great Britain, they met with little or no success. No churches of that order were formed till about the time the New England emigrants left that country: nor did such churches become at all numerous, till the time of the civil wars, when they were greatly favored by Cromwell's famous army. It is clear, therefore, that our ancestors could have had no special knowledge of their character, except what they inferred from the behavior of those unhappy Germans.

That we have assigned the true reason of the proceedings of our fathers, is evident from the very terms of the law, as it stands on the Massachusetts' records, under date of the thirteenth of November, 1644.

"Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully

* Magnalia, Book VII., Ch. IV., Sec. 4.