Very
reverend and godly he truly was, and a respect not merely ceremonious,
but personal, a respect that savors of love, shows itself in the letters
addressed to him. Charity and tolerance flow so naturally from the pen of
Williams that it is plain they were in his heart. He does not show
himself a very strong or very wise man, but a thoroughly gentle and good
one. His affection for the two Winthrops is evidently of the warmest. We
suspect that he lived to see that there was more reason in the drum-head
religious discipline which made him, against his will, the founder of a
commonwealth, than he may have thought at first. But for the fanaticism
(as it is the fashion to call the sagacious straitness) of the abler men
who knew how to root the English stock firmly in this new soil on either
side of him, his little plantation could never have existed, and he
himself would have been remembered only, if at all, as one of the jarring
atoms in a chaos of otherwise-mindedness.
Two other men, Emanuel Downing and Hugh Peter, leave a positively
unpleasant savor in the nostrils. Each is selfish in his own
way,--Downing with the shrewdness of an attorney, Peter with that
clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates into
greasiness.
Pages:
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356