moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought
spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that
same liberty to others. "I have only one motion and petition,"
begs this veteran pioneer who had forded many a swollen stream
and built many a rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this,
that after you have got over the black brook of some soul bondage
yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after you."

It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger
Williams is remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects
than his, but the world has long since decided against them.
Colonial sermon literature is read today chiefly by antiquarians
who have no sympathy for the creed which once gave it vitality.
Its theology, like the theology of "Paradise Lost or the Divine
Comedy," has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. But we cannot
judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit literature
without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and
pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians
properly insist upon the aesthetic poverty of the New England
Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment
of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its
most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no
architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to
men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures"
served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the
mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of
human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers,
passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the
noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book,
the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and