My mother's earliest recorded ancestor was a John Maxson, one of the
band of Roger Williams, driven by the Puritans out of Massachusetts
into the wilder parts of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,"
where--in the absence of all established law, as well as
government--they might worship God in the way their consciences
dictated, free from the restrictions on the liberty of conscience
imposed by the Pilgrim Fathers. There, at last, complete freedom of
dissent was found, and one of the consequences was that the colony
became a sort of field for Christian dialectics, where the most
extreme doctrines on all points of Christian belief were discussed
without other or more serious results of the _odium theologicum_ than
the building of many meeting-houses and the multiplication of sects.
Among these sects was one which played an important part in the local
theology of that day and for many years afterward, that known as the
"Seventh-Day Baptist," to which, it seems, John Maxson belonged. It
was not a new invention of the colonists, but had existed in England
since the days of early dissent, and it is possible that John Maxson
had brought the doctrine with him from England. Adhering to the
practice of baptism by immersion, the sect also maintained the
immutable obligation of the Seventh-Day Sabbath of the Ten
Commandments, the Jewish day of rest.

The grave disabilities imposed on them in Massachusetts by the
obligatory abstention from labor on two days, on one day by conscience
and the other by the rigorous laws of the Puritans, made Roger
Williams's little state the paradise of the Sabbatarians, and the sect
flourished greatly in it, while the social isolation consequent on
the practice of contracting marriages only in their church
membership--made imperative if family dissensions were to be avoided
on a question of primary importance to that community, which had