ge the civil power for a pure religion that
they were dwelling in poor huts on these ocean headlands, and sustaining
their lives upon muscles gathered on the shore after the receding of the
tide.

Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Arnold hold and utter quite opposite judgments about
the treatment of Roger Williams by Massachusetts. The latter, having
stated more definitely than the former the limited aim of our colonists,
which was utterly inconsistent with toleration in religion and with
laxity in civil matters, nevertheless considers the men of Massachusetts
unjustifiable in their course toward the founder of Rhode Island. Dr.
Palfrey, on weaker grounds than those allowed by Mr. Arnold, thinks
their most stringent proceedings perfectly defensible. He regards Mr.
Williams as an intruder, whose opinions, behavior, and influence were
perilous alike to the civil and the religious peace of the colonists;
and he holds the colonists as not chargeable with any breach of the
laws of justice or of mercy in sending out of their jurisdiction, into
another patch of the same wilderness, a man all whose phenomena were of
the most uncomfortable and irritating character. We confess that our
reading and thinking identify our judgment on this matter with that
of our own historian. There can be no question but that Roger
Williams--whether he was thirty-two years old, as Mr. Arnold thinks,
or, as Dr. Palfrey judges, in his twenty-fifth year, when he landed
here--was, in what we must call his youth, seeing that he lived to an
advanced age, a heady and contentious theorizer. Our fathers could not
try more than one theory at a time; and the theory they were bent upon
testing naturally preceded, in the series of the world's progressive
experiments, the more generous, but, at the same time, more dangerous
one which he advanced; and their theory had a right to an earlier and
a full trial, as lying in the way of a safe advance towards his bolder
Utopianism. The mild Bradford and the yet milder Brewster were glad when
Plymouth was rid of him. His first manifestation of himself, on
his arrival here, requires to be invested with the halo of a later
admiration, before it can be made to consist with the heralding of
an apostle of the generous principles of toleration and charity in
religion. Winthrop had recorded for us his refusal "to join with the
congregation at Boston." This had been understood as referring to an
unwillingness on the part of Williams to enter