An Episode in Madison s Career. Dunton, if you'd only owned up that you'd kissed your wife I'd have let you off." But Dunton did not answer. He was put ting on his shirt at the moment, and under such circumstances no man could make a dignified reply. The frigate now had come up to the wind, and the sailors cast the rowboat adrift. As the distance between them rapidly widened, Mollic came on deck and the Puritans saw John deliberately kiss her several times, and
339
they heard him call out to them, " I say, Dunton, change that law of yours, will you, and flogg the man who doesn't kiss his wife." Nobody answered him, and by the time the indignant Puritans had reached the shore, the Eagle with her great wings spread out to the wind had passed between the islands and was speeding away toward the high seas be yond the jurisdiction of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
AN EPISODE IN MADISON'S CAREER. BY MARIA NEWTON MARSHALL. It is not likely that the course of lectures delivered by Dr. John Fiskeat the Berke ley Lyceum, New York City, in the winter of 1897, can have been excelled by any since delivered, even by himself. And the lec ture which closed the series, upon " The Progress of Liberal Thought in America," must have drawn toward him the heart of every Virginian in his audience, in its eulogy of Madison of illustrious memory. "It was Madison's act in Virginia," said he, " that was the cause of the beginning of all freedom of thought in recent times. This act was .translated into many languages, and its provisions were followed by one State after another. Massachusetts was the colony founded upon the most illiberal principles, and was the narrowest and most fanatical of all the States. Now, it is safe to say that from that State have emanated the most lib eral religious views in the United States." In our own untroubled times, when church rule and state rule are happily independent of each other — or, more properly speaking, the independent government of which is as distinctive as its individual sphere— it is hard for us to understand how a hundred and more years ago their claims were so antagonistic and their animosity so bitter. Yet there was
indeed a time, when, blackest of the clouds that overhung our troubled land was the black cloud of religious strife —-a contradiction in terms, indeed, if by " religion " we mean the kernel and not the shell of our belief. And it was over Virginia — ever fated to suffer as well as to triumph — that the storm -first burst furiously. The strife between the Non-conformists and those who favored the union of church and State was bitter and long. Chief among the army of Dissenters in Virginia were the Baptists, whose first church in this State was established in I 760, followed shortly by others, in Orange, Spottsylvania, and the neighbor ing counties. The clergy tried in vain to put down the new sect, and the civil authori ties went so far as to imprison and otherwise persecute the aliens, as they were looked upon. Prominent among the leaders of the new church were the Reverends Waller, Craig and Childs, who were at one time con fined in the jail at Fredericksburg, but whose zeal was so great that they preached through the barred windows to the throngs that gath ered daily to hear them. History tells us, furthermore, of one James Read of North Carolina, who claimed to have had a vision, and to have been directed by a heavenly voice
