Charles A. Nelson , A. M., Waltham, past, present and its industries, with an historical sketch of Watertown from its settlement in 1630 to the incorporation of Waltham, January 15, 1739.

‘ [29] opinions, that it was not safe to pay moneys after that sort, for fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage.’ This resistance to the order of the Court resulted in their being summoned, ‘the pastor and elder by letter, and the others by warrant,’ before the Governor and Assistants on the 17th of the same month. ‘After much debate,’ says Winthrop, ‘they acknowledged their fault, confessing freely, that they were in an errour, and made a retraction and submission under their hands, and were enjoined to read it in the assembly the next Lord's day.’ Whether they fully retracted from their publicly expressed opinions may be questioned, as Bond well says, from their ‘much debate,’ the well-known character of the men, and the proceedings at the next Court held less than three months later.

These men, thus independent, may well be considered good specimens of what Thomas Carlyle has said the Seventeenth-Century Puritans were:—Men ‘who had thought about this world very seriously indeed, and with very considerable thinking faculty indeed,’ and who were ‘not quite so far behindhand in their conclusions respecting it.’ With them ‘Cant was not fashionable at all;’ for them ‘that stupendous invention of “Speech for the purpose of concealing thought” was not yet made.’ No one of them could have been deemed ‘a man wagging the tongue of him, as if it were the clapper of a bell to be rung for economic purposes, and not so much as attempting to convey any inner thought, if thought he had, of the matter talked of.’ ‘These Puritans do mean what they say,’ and with the same spirit mentioned above they aimed their opposition at the principle involved, which was thought to be full of danger, and not at the petty tax¹ imposed in this instance.

To the agitation of this subject [by Watertown people], says Savage in his note [Winthrop, I. p. 71], we may refer the origin of that committee of two from each town to advise with the Court about raising public moneys, ‘so as what [they should agree upon should bind all.’ At the next Court, held May 9th, these Committees² were