countersigned by native proprietors; and during his residence in Plymouth
he had learned the Indian language. All this now stood him in good stead.
The man who was outcast from the society of his white brethren, because
his soul was purer and stronger than theirs, was received and ministered
unto by the savages; he knew their ways, was familiar in their wigwams,
championed their rights, wrestled lovingly with their errors, mediated in
their quarrels, and was idolized by them as was no other of his race.
Pokanoket, Massasoit and Canonicus were his hosts and guardians during the
winter and spring; and in summer he descended the river in a birch-bark
canoe to the site of the present city of Providence, so named by him in
recognition of the Divine mercies; and there he pitched his tent beside
the spring, hoping to make the place "a shelter for persons distressed for
conscience."

His desire was amply fulfilled. The chiefs of the Narragansetts deeded
him a large tract of land; oppressed persons locked to him for comfort and
succor, and never in vain; a republic grew up based on liberty of
conscience, and the civil rule of the majority: the first in the world.
Orthodoxy and heresy were on the same footing before him; he trusted truth
to conquer error without aid of force. Though he ultimately withdrew from
all churches, he founded the first Baptist church in the new world; he
twice visited England, and obtained a charter for his colony in 1644.
Williams from first to last sat on the Opposition Bench of life; and we
say of him that he was hardly used by those who should most have honored
him. Yet it is probable that he would have found less opportunity to do
good at either an earlier or a later time. Critics so keen and unrelenting
as he never find favor with the ruling powers; he would have been at least
as "impossible" in the Nineteenth Century as he was in the Seventeenth;
and we would have had no Rhode Island to give him. We can derive more
benefit from his arraignment of society two hundred and fifty years ago