was attained.” (p. 11.) And again, Mr. Arnold says,—­“They founded a colony for their own faith, without any idea of tolerating others.” (p. 44.) All this is admirably said.  It is precisely what the exiles would wish might be said of them in all the histories of them; for it is what they said of themselves, in defining their own object; it was, further, what they felt in their hearts to be their object, more intensely than they could give it utterance.  But the object is at once seen to be limited within the fearful license of religious freedom.  The Scriptural and legislative fetters on such liberty were too repressive not to amount to an essential qualification of it.  “The Simple Cobbler of Agawam,” Ward of Ipswich, made a clean breast for himself and his contemporaries, when he numbered among the “foure things which my heart hath naturally detested:  Tolerations of diverse Religions, or of one Religion in segregant shapes.  He that willingly assents to this, if he examines his heart by daylight, his conscience will tell him he is either an Atheist, or an Heretigal, or an Hypocrite, or at best a captive to some lust.  Poly-piety is the greatest impiety in the world.”  With such frank avowals on the part of those who had borne so much in the attempt to make themselves comfortable in their exile to these hard regions, that they might here try to work out their harder problem, it is a great deal too severe a standard for judging their acts which is set up for them in the fancied principle of religious liberty.  We wonder that Mr. Arnold withholds from them the benefit of his and their own clear limitation of the principle,—­a limitation so severe, as, in fact, to constitute quite another principle.  Was it at all strange, then, that they should deal resolutely with Roger Williams, on account of “the firmness with which, upon every occasion, he maintained the doctrine, that the civil power has no control over the religious opinions of men.”? (p. 41.) It was for no other purpose than to engage 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