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 into communion with the church.  But from a letter of his which has come to light within the year, it seems that he had been invited, previously to the arrival of Cotton, to become teacher of the church.  And on account of what constraint of soul-liberty did he decline the office?  Because the members of that church “would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there”!  The good man lived to grow milder and more tolerant of the whims and prejudices and convictions of his fellow-men, through a free indulgence of his own.  And, what is more remarkable, he found it necessary to apply, in restraint of others, several of the measures against which he had protested when brought to bear upon himself.  He came to discover that there was mischief in “such an infinite liberty of conscience” as was claimed by his own followers.  The erratic Gorton was to him precisely what the legislators of Massachusetts had feared that he himself would prove to be to them.  He publicly declared himself in favor of “a due and moderate restraint and punishing” of some of the oddities of the Quakers.  In less than ten years after he had so frightened Massachusetts by questioning the validity of an English charter to jurisdiction here, he went to England on a successful errand to obtain just such a document for himself and his friends.