of the General Court. He sold his lands to Henry Herrick, and left the
jurisdiction.

One of the most enlightened, and perhaps most accomplished, men among
the first inhabitants of Salem Village, was Townsend Bishop. He was
admitted a freeman in 1635. The next year, he appears on the list of
members of the Salem Church. He was one of the judges of the local
court, and, almost without intermission from his first coming here, a
deputy to the General Court. In 1645, as his attention had been led to
the subject, he conceived doubts in reference to infant baptism; and
it was noticed that he did not bring forward a child, recently born,
to the rite. Although himself on the bench, and ever before the object
of popular favor and public honors, he was at once brought up, and
handed over for discipline. The next year, he sold his estates, and
probably removed elsewhere. He appears no more in our annals. Where he
went, I have not been able to learn. It is to be hoped that he found
somewhere a more congenial and tolerant abode. It is evident that he
could not breathe in an atmosphere of bigotry; and it was difficult to
find one free from the miasma in those days.

Five of the most valuable of the first settlers of the
village--Weston, Waterman, Scruggs, Alford, and Bishop--were thus
early driven into exile, or subdued to silence, by the stern policy on
which the colony was founded. It is an error to characterize this as
religious bigotry. It was not so much a theological as a political
persecution. Its apparent form was in reference to tenets of faith,
but the policy was deeper than this. Any attempt to make opposition to
the existing administration was treated with equal severity, whatever
might be the subject on which it ventured to display itself.