to the Indians,” the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue.  Eliot hoped and toiled a life-time for the conversion of those “salvages,” “tawnies,” “devil-worshipers,” for whom our early writers have usually nothing but bad words.  They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so entitled) Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament—­the first Bible printed in America—­remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great value to students of the Indian languages.

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and the landscape was always dark and wintry.  Such is the impression which one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford’s and Winthrop’s Journals, or Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World—­an impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe “between the groaning forest and the shore.”  The Indian terror hung over New England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King Philip’s War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a general massacre.  Added to this were the perplexities caused by the earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in religion.  The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and conservative Puritanism.  The later and more grotesque out-crops of the movement in the old England found no toleration in the new.  But these refugees for conscience’ sake were compelled in turn to persecute Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their precincts and troubled the churches with “prophesyings” and novel opinions.  Some of those were banished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a few were put to death.  Of the exiles the most noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State.  Williams was driven away from the Massachusetts colony—­where he had been minister of the church at Salem—­and with a few followers fled into the southern wilderness and settled at Providence.  There, and in the neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of worship to all comers.  Williams was a prolific writer on theological subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, 1644, and a supplement to the same called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled The Bloody