Note Note 10, page 288 — BOOK III. CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING.

Williams dealt with ecclesiastically. Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governorship by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher" of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, entitled as such to be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's "violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. Note 10. Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.