her sister, side by side, at the communion-table, for several
years. "Forbid it," she prayed with herself, "that I should go where I
cannot be allowed to follow Christ till I have separated this dear one
from my side."

She once wrote a letter on the subject to the gentleman, which he
showed, after their marriage, to some of his friends. There will be no
impropriety in its appearing here. It ran thus:

"MY DEAR MR. E.: Though I am not willing to deny that Roger
Williams was, as you say, raised up to illustrate some important
principles, and to help on the general cause of truth, I must say
that he strikes me as a very unreasonable man in much of his
behavior. Our puritan fathers did not come to this wilderness with
French, atheistic, idolatrous love for a goddess of liberty. They
came here, it is true, for liberty of conscience and freedom to
worship God. With a great sum they purchased this freedom. But
infidels could as well claim to be absolved by the laws from all
recognition of God, under the plea of liberty, as Mr. Williams and
his friends could make his demands for toleration. To insist that
our fathers, in their circumstances, should have opened their doors
wide to every doctrine, and to the denial of everything professed
by them, is unreasonable. They came here with an intense love for
certain truths and practices, which persecution had only served to
make exceedingly precious to them. To have proclaimed at once
universal toleration of every wind of doctrine, would have proved
them libertines in religion. Because they did not so, reproach is
cast upon them by some, who seem to me to be free-thinkers on the
subject of religious liberty. If other men wished to found a
community with doctrines and practices adverse to those of the New
England fathers, the land was wide, and it would have been the part
of good manners in Mr. Williams to have gone into the wilderness at
once, to subdue it and to fight the savages, all for love and zeal
for his own tenets, instead of poaching upon the hard-earned soil
of those who had laid down their all for what they deemed to be the
truth. It seems to me unphilosophical in some of our historians to
reflect, as they do, upon our forefathers for not being so totally
indifferent to what they deemed error, as to allow it free course.
The