ons were presented to the Plymouth Court; one from Rehoboth,
signed by thirty-five persons; one from Taunton; one from all the
clergymen in the colony but two, and one from the government of
Massachusetts. How will the authorities at Plymouth treat this first
division in the ruling church of the colony? Will they punish by severe
fines, by imprisonment, by scourgings, or by banishment? By neither, for
a milder spirit of toleration prevailed, and the separatists were simply
directed to "refrain from practices disagreeable to their brethren, and
to appear before the Court."

In 1651, some time after his trial at Plymouth, Mr. Holmes was arrested,
with Mr. Clarke, of Newport, and Mr. Crandall, for preaching and
worshiping God with some of their brethren at Lynn. They were condemned
by the Court at Boston to suffer fines or whippings. Holmes refused to
pay the fine, and would not allow his friends to pay it for him, saying
that "to pay it would be acknowledging himself to have done wrong,
whereas his conscience testified that he had done right." He was
accordingly punished with thirty lashes from a three-corded whip, with
such severity, says Governor Jenks, "that in many days, if not some
weeks, he could take no rest but as he lay upon his knees and elbows,
not being able to suffer any part of his body to touch the bed whereon
he lay." Soon after this, Holmes and his followers moved to Newport, and
on the death of the Reverend Mr. Clarke, in 1652, he succeeded him as
pastor of the First Baptist Church in that time. Mr. Holmes died at
Newport in 1682, aged seventy-six years.

The persecution offered to the Rehoboth Baptists scattered their
church, but did not destroy their principles. Facing the obloquy
attached to their cause, and braving the trials imposed by the civil
and ecclesiastical powers, they must wait patiently God's time of
deliverance. That their lives were free from guile, none claim. That
their cause was righteous, none will deny; and while the elements
of a Baptist church were thus gathering strength on this side of the
Atlantic, a leader was prepared for them, by God's providence, on the
other. In the same year that Obadiah Holmes and his band established
their church in Massachusetts, in opposition to the Puritan order,
Charles I, the great English traitor, expiated his "high crimes and
misdemeanors" on the scaffold, at the hands of a Puritan Parliament.
Then followed the period of the Commonwealth under C