Therefore, when Roger Williams, a bright young minister from England, came to preach in the first church of Boston, the people soon found that he believed in a different form of baptism from theirs, and some were angry enough to wish to kill him for being a Baptist. So he left Boston and went to live at Plymouth. The preaching of those days was not so much about doing good and living by the Golden Rule as about certain fixed beliefs. This often led to angry arguments, and some good people became very violent. On this account Roger Williams soon had to leave Plymouth. Then he went to Salem and built a little church there which is still standing, about three hundred years old. Here the young minister kept on preaching what the leaders thought were strange and wicked teachings. It was decided that such a reckless preacher should be arrested and sent in chains to England to be tried, and imprisoned or put to death. But Roger Williams heard of this decision and did not wait to be arrested. When the captain and his men from Boston came to the Salem minister’s house, they found that he had left there three days before.
When the people of Boston, Salem, and Plymouth next heard of Roger Williams, he was settled on Narragansett Bay. The Indians there received him gladly, for he had been one of the few white men who treated them kindly, as William Penn, fifty years afterwards, dealt with the Indians along the Delaware River.
Williams and his friends built a group of log houses and named their settlement Providence, because they believed that, in the providence, or care, of God, they had found a safe retreat among the savages from the severity of the pious Puritans of Massachusetts. Quakers and other religious people, who were driven from the Puritan colonies, came and settled near Roger Williams. Even here the people of different beliefs quarreled over religious matters, and good Pastor Williams had all he could do to keep them from fighting and injuring one another.
Soon the savage Pequot Indians tried to persuade all the Indian tribes to join together and kill at a stroke all the white men who had come over the Great Water and taken from the natives certain parts of their country. When the white men of Boston and Plymouth heard of this they sent and begged Roger Williams to use his good influence with his neighbors the Narragansetts, a large and powerful tribe, to prevent them from joining in the plot to murder all the white men—as the Indians could have done if all the tribes had joined together and attacked all at once.
Here was a chance for Roger Williams to get even with those who had wished to kill or imprison him and who had driven him from place to place. But the minister of Providence returned good for evil. Taking his life in his hands, he went to the Indian village. The Pequot braves were there in the wigwam of Canonicus, the Narragansett chief,
