* * * * * The set and sturdy resolution of the founders of the four colonies of the New England confederacy that the first planting of their territory should be on rigorously exclusive principles, with a homogeneous and mutually congenial population, under a firm discipline both civil and ecclesiastical, finds an experimental justification in the history of the neighbor colony of Rhode Island. No commonwealth can boast a nobler and purer name for its founder than the name of Roger Williams. Rhode Island, founded in generous reaction from the exclusiveness of Massachusetts, embodied the principle of "soul-liberty" in its earliest acts. The announcement that under its jurisdiction no man was to be molested by the civil power for his religious belief was a broad invitation to all who were uncomfortable under the neighboring theocracies.[106:1] And the invitation was freely accepted. The companions of Williams were reinforced by the friends of Mrs. Hutchinson, some of them men of substance and weight of character. The increasing number of persons 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