Newport in 1682, aged seventy-six years.

The persecution offered to the Rehoboth Baptists scattered their
church, but did not destroy their principles. Facing the obloquy
attached to their cause, and braving the trials imposed by the civil
and ecclesiastical powers, they must wait patiently God's time of
deliverance. That their lives were free from guile, none claim. That
their cause was righteous, none will deny; and while the elements
of a Baptist church were thus gathering strength on this side of the
Atlantic, a leader was prepared for them, by God's providence, on the
other. In the same year that Obadiah Holmes and his band established
their church in Massachusetts, in opposition to the Puritan order,
Charles I, the great English traitor, expiated his "high crimes and
misdemeanors" on the scaffold, at the hands of a Puritan Parliament.
Then followed the period of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and then
the Restoration, when "there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew
not Joseph." The Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, under the sanction
of Charles II, though a fatal blow at the purity and piety of the
English Church, was a royal blessing to the cause of religion in
America. Two thousand bravely conscientious men, who feared God more
than the decrees of Pope, King, or Parliament, were driven from their
livings and from the kingdom. What was England's great loss was
America's great gain, for a grand tidal wave of emigration swept
westward across the Atlantic to our shores. Godly men and women, clergy
and laity, made up this exiled band, too true and earnest to yield a
base compliance to the edict of conformity. For thirteen years here the
Dissenters from Mr. Newman's church waited for a spiritual guide, but
not in vain.

How our Baptist brethren here conducted themselves during these years,