of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained
the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Williams
was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been
minister of the church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the
southern wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the
neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a
charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of
worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological
subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his
_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same
called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John
Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody
Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_. Williams was
also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be
taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing,
in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_. Although at odds with
the theology of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence
with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He
visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John
Milton.

Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the
purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by
superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that
Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in
America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them,
sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special
providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the
northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others
as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor,
been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open
assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it
might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There
will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a
little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will
be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief
culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that
"s