The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I | Page 3

earliest recorded ancestor was a John Maxson, one of the band of Roger Williams, driven by the Puritans out of Massachusetts into the wilder parts of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," where--in the absence of all established law, as well as government--they might worship God in the way their consciences dictated, free from the restrictions on the liberty of conscience imposed by the Pilgrim Fathers. There, at last, complete freedom of dissent was found, and one of the consequences was that the colony became a sort of field for Christian dialectics, where the most extreme doctrines on all points of Christian belief were discussed without other or more serious results of the odium theologicum than the building of many meeting-houses and the multiplication of sects. Among these sects was one which played an important part in the local theology of that day and for many years afterward, that known as the "Seventh-Day Baptist," to which, it seems, John Maxson belonged. It was not a new invention of the colonists, but had existed in England since the days of early dissent, and it is possible that John Maxson had brought the doctrine with him from England. Adhering to the practice of baptism by immersion, the sect also maintained the immutable obligation of the Seventh-Day Sabbath of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish day of rest.
The grave disabilities imposed on them in Massachusetts by the obligatory abstention from labor on two days, on one day by conscience and the other by the rigorous laws of the Puritans, made Roger Williams's little state the paradise of the Sabbatarians, and the sect flourished greatly in it, while the social isolation consequent on the practice of contracting marriages only in their church membership--made imperative if family dissensions were to be avoided on a question of primary importance to that community, which had sacrificed all worldly advantages to what it believed to be obedience to the Word of God--at once knit together their church in closer relations, and drew to it others from the outside, attracted by the magnetism of a more ascetic faith.
Amongst the emigrants from England on the Restoration were a family by the name of Stillman, who, having had relations with the regicides, went into what was then the most obscure and remote part of New England and settled at Wethersfield, in Connecticut. One of the brothers,--George,--hearing of this strange doctrine denying the sanctity of the "Lord's Day," came to Newport to convert the erring brothers; but, convinced by them, remained in the colony, where he became a shining light. Thus it happened that both lines of my ancestry became involved in the mystic bonds of a faith which was shut off in a peculiar manner from all around them. The consequent isolation, I fear, made much for self-righteousness. In their eyes it was this observance which maintained continuity between the Christian church and the institutions imposed in Paradise, and therefore made them peculiarly the people of God. This amiable fanaticism, fervent without being uncharitable, interfered in no wise with the widest exercise of Christian sympathy with other sects, the observance of the Seventh-Day Sabbath not being held as an essential to godliness or to Christian fellowship, the non-observance being possibly only due to ignorance, so that the relations of the historic First Seventh-Day Baptist Church at Newport with the churches observing the "Lord's-Day Sabbath" were always most kindly. The meeting-house occupied by the Sabbatarians on the seventh day was occupied by one of the Sunday-observing sects on the first, and the preachers of one often officiated for the other. But the worldly advantage enjoyed by the Sunday keeper was so considerable that all who did not hold to the finest scruple of conscience in their conduct passed over to the majority, and were excluded from the communion as a precaution against the Sunday keepers becoming a majority in the church and taking it away from the Sabbath keepers, as did actually occur with one of their congregations in Vermont. In our community generally there was a most scrupulous avoidance of any occupation on Sunday which might annoy those who held it as Sabbath, and though in the State of New York the laws were extremely liberal in this respect, my father in my boyhood always made it a point not to allow in his workshop any work which would be heard by the neighbors.
The absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, for the first time found in this colony, had, as its first effect, the banishment of all forms of sectarian persecution, so that the maxim of the Broad Church--"Freedom in non-essentials"--was here put in practical activity to an extent probably never before known in the Christian world.
It can be readily understood that this continual selection of the most scrupulous consciences, the closest