Our two historians, with all the facts before them, honestly stated too, but diversely interpreted, stand in open antagonism of judgment about the proceedings of Massachusetts against the Antinomians.  That bitter strife—­Dux foemina facti—­was in continuation of the issue opened by Roger Williams, though it turned upon new elements.  Here, again, Mr. Arnold stands stoutly for the partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, who moved towards the new home in the Narragensett country.  He sees in the strife, mainly, a contest of a purely theological character, leading on to a development of democratical ideas, (p. 66.) Dr. Palfrey insists that it would be unjust to allege that the Antinomians were dealt with for holding “distasteful opinions on dark questions of theology,” and affirms that they were put down as wild and alarming agents of an “immediate anarchy.” (pp. 489, 491.) In this matter, also, our own judgment goes with our own historian.  And the very best confirmation that it could have is found in the fact, that the prime movers in the most threatening stage of that dire conflict afterwards made ample confession of their heat, their folly, and their outrages,—­approving the stern proceedings under which they had suffered.  Wheelwright, especially, in whose advocacy the cause of his sister-in-law first assumed so threatening an aspect, most humbly avowed his sin and penitence.

One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our two new historians may be instanced.  They have both written, as became them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the soil.  But how marvellously they differ!  Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life.  His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity.  He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity.  But Mr. Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain.  He reproduces and refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel.  He exalts the Indian character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them capacity to fill it.  The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by Mr. Arnold as “his seat at Mount Hope,” (p. 23,)—­and pungently, by Dr. Palfrey, as “his sty,” in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had “a distressing experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality.” (pp. 183, 184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians “were ignorant of Revelation, yet here was Plato’s great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the West.” (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary was writing, had already put into print this sentence:—­“The New England savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain.” (p. 49.)