Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/177

FROM PERSECUTION TO TOLERATION. 135 thirty years following witnessed scenes as tragic and as heroic as have been embalmed in history. Men's bodies and souls were tried and not found wanting in physical and moral courage or in a sublime faith, John Myles at Swansea and his son Samuel at Boston stood for the larger and broader faith of our own day, and though they died without the sight, yet they lived long enough to see the whole spirit of the ancient time breaking in the presence of " sweeter manners, purer laws " of tolera- tion. One step was taken in their day from persecution to toleration. Later, toleration gave way to liberty whose dawn is now the hope of mankind. We have good reason to hold John Myles in memory as the founder of the first free Baptist Church in The Common- wealth of Massachusetts ; as the co-founder with Captain Thomas Willett of a town after the Baptist order, the first and the only one in the Commonwealth of the early found- ing and of the declaration on Massachusetts soil and the practical application of the principles of a true Christian Society, " In essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity."