Note 177 — Chapter XIX

Fox did not see Roger Williams in Providence, though the latter had a personal tilt with John Burnyeat at Newport in 1671. After George Fox had left Providence and had gone back down the Bay with his companion, Nicholas Easton, governor of Rhode Island, Roger Williams rowed to Newport with a challenge to a debate. Fox, however, had already left the island, and was well on his way toward Long Island. Williams then wrote, what Fox elsewhere calls "Roger Williams's 'Book of Lyes,'" a book bearing the grimly humorous title, "George Fox digged out of his Burrows," Boston, 1676. (See Publications of the Narragansett Club, Vol. V., pp. xx.-xlv., Providence, 1872.) Fox and Burnyeat reply to this "slanderous book" in a sixty-five-page pamphlet entitled, "A New England Fire Brand Quenched." Fox seemed not to know just where the famous "apostle of soul liberty" lived, as he says, "a priest of New England (or some colony thereabouts!)"