who suffered agonies of doubt
respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
hour.

These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?

These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick