inclined to Baptist views found in Rhode
Island a free and congenial atmosphere. Williams himself was not long in
coming to the Baptist position and passing beyond it. The Quakers found
Rhode Island a safe asylum from persecution, whether Puritan or Dutch.
More disorderly and mischievous characters, withal, quartered
themselves, unwelcome guests, on the young commonwealth, a thorn in its
side and a reproach to its principles. It became clear to Williams
before his death that the declaration of individual rights and
independence is not of itself a sufficient foundation for a state. The
heterogeneous population failed to settle into any stable polity. After
two generations the tyranny of Andros, so odious elsewhere in New
England, was actually welcome as putting an end to the liberty that had
been hardly better than anarchy.

The results of the manner of the first planting on the growth of the
church in Rhode Island were of a like sort. There is no room for
question that the material of a true church was there, in the person of
faithful and consecrated disciples of Christ, and therefore there must
have been gathering together in common worship and mutual edification.
But the sense of individual rights and responsibilities seems to have
overshadowed the love for the whole brotherhood of disciples. The
condition of the church illustrated the Separatism of Williams reduced
to the absurd. There was feeble organization of Christians in knots and
coteries. But sixty years passed before the building of the first house
of worship in Providence, and at the end of almost a century "there had
not existed in the whole colony more than eight or ten churches of any
denomination, and these were mostly in a very feeble and precarious
state."[107:1]

Meanwhile the inadequate compensations of a state of schism began to
show themselves. In the absence of any organized fellowship of the whole
there grew up, more than elsewhere, a mutual tolerance and even love
among the petty sects, the lesson of which was learned where it was most
needed. The churches of "the standing order" in Massachusetts not only
admired but imitated "the peace and love which societies of different
modes of worship entertained toward each other in Rhode Island." In
1718, not forty years from the time when Baptist churches ceased to be
_religio illicita_ in Massachusetts, three foremost pastors of Boston
assisted in the ordination of a minister to the Baptist church, at