Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in the
flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived
Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to
take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize
their own history and present position, to ask searching
questions of themselves. "You have better food and raiment than
was in former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but
have you better hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas
Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains that "Faith is
dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election
sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History,
biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of
that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of
John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same
anniversary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans
to a fresh recognition of the services wrought by the Fathers of
the Republic. So it was in the colonies at the close of the
seventeenth century. Old England, in one final paroxysm of
political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That
Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the
First and in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of
that momentous conflict had its reverberation across the
Atlantic, as the history of the granting and withdrawal of
colonial charters witnesses abundantly. The American pioneers
were quite aware of what was going on in England, and they
praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or