Wales had been the asylum for the persecuted and oppressed for many centuries.  There freedom of religious thought was tolerated, and from thence sprung three men of unusual vigor and power:  Roger Williams, Oliver Cromwell, and John Myles.  About the year 1645, the Baptists in that country who had previously been scattered and connected with other churches, began to unite in the formation of separate churches, under their own pastors.  Prominent among these was the Reverend Mr. Myles, who preached in various places with great success, until the year 1649, when we find him pastor of a church which he organized in Swansea, in South Wales.  It is a singular coincidence that Mr. Myles’s pastorate at Swansea, and the separation of the members from the Rehoboth church, a part of whom aided in establishing the church in Swanzey, Massachusetts, occurred in the same year.

During the Protectorate of Cromwell, all Dissenters enjoyed the largest liberty of conscience, and, as a result, the church at Swansea grew from forty-eight to three hundred souls.  Around this centre of influence sprang up several branch churches, and pastors were raised up to care for them.  Mr. Myles soon became the leader of his denomination in Wales, and in 1651 he was sent as the representative of all the Baptist churches in Wales to the Baptist ministers’ meeting, at Glazier’s Hall, London, with a letter, giving an account of the peace, union, and increase of the work.  As a preacher and worker he had no equal in that country, and his zeal enabled him to establish many new churches in his native land.  The act of the English Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in 1662, deprived Mr. Myles of the support which the government under Cromwell had granted him, and he, with many others, chose the freedom of exile to the tyranny of an unprincipled monarch.  It would be interesting for us to give an account of his leave-taking of his church at Swansea, and of his associates in Christian labor, and to trace out his passage to Massachusetts, and to relate the circumstances which led him to search out and to find the little band of Baptists at Rehoboth.  Surely some law of spiritual gravitation or affinity, under the good hand of God, thus raised up and brought this under-shepherd to the flock thus scattered in the wilderness.  Nicholas Tanner, Obadiah Brown, John Thomas, and others, accompanied Mr. Myles in his exile from Swansea, Wales.  The first that is known of them in America was the formation of a Baptist church at the house of John Butterworth in Rehoboth, whose residence is said to have been near the Cove in the western part of the present town of East Providence.  Mr. Myles and his followers had probably learned at Boston, or at Plymouth, of the treatment offered to Holmes and his party, ten years before, and his sympathies led him to seek out and unite the elements which persecution had scattered.  Seven members made up this infant church, namely:  John Myles, pastor, James Brown, Nicholas Tanner,