Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/150

CHAPTER IX

THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH IN MASSACHUSETTS

Religious Toleration as Interpreted by Pilgrims and Puritans—A State Church—Roger Williams Heresy—Rev. Samuel Newman and the Rehoboth Church—Rehoboth Heretics—Obadiah Holmes—Massachusetts Bay Letter to Plymouth—Boston and the Baptists—English Politics—John Myles of Wales—Baptists meet at Rehoboth—Mr. Myles the Leader of the New Movement—Mr. Myles and John Brown Fined—Baptist Church Formed—Meeting House Located—Covenant of the Swansea Church—Rehoboth Repents—A Liberal Minister and Church—John Myles, the School-Master—Captain John Myles, the Soldier in Philip's War—John Myles Preaches at Boston—Return to Swansea—New Home and Meeting-House—His Death—Rev. Samuel Luther—A New Policy—A Review of the Situation.

OUR Pilgrim and Puritan ancestry, the founders of Boston and Salem and Weymouth and Plymouth, came to America for several good and sufficient reasons; the principal one was to find comfortable rest from the deep political and religious unrest of the mother-land. Spiritually they had found an enlightenment above most of their fellow countrymen, and finding themselves growing out of sympathy with what was transpiring about them, they looked about for a city of refuge to which to flee. Men they were with a new revelation, heretics if you please, honest, sincere, devout, godly, and tremendously in earnest. John Milton and Oliver Cromwell belonged to their order; so did Harry Vane, once Governor of Massachusetts, the defender of Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, who suffered death at the Restoration, with Hugh Peters, once the minister at Salem and one of the founders of Harvard College. These early New England people wished, as they thought they had a right, to be let alone as