choose but like them, thinking it
generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command
from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them--in
critical moods--for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution
of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his
person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation,
then existing on this continent.

This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them
out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast
of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and
this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal
interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence
with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their
theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to
pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his
return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for
their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by
refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet
should pollute it.

It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty
and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were
pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of
their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things
which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the
path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as
provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and
development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have
affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into
such stately proportions.

Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all
intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still
lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe
its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of
it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their
sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We
should count it no gain to us, however--the extinction of this old and
venerable faith--if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler
and sublim