Between the founding
of Jamestown and the rebellion under the leadership of Nathaniel
Bacon almost seventy years had intervened, an interval
corresponding to that which separates us from the Mexican War.
Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in the
flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived
Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to
take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize
their own history and present position, to ask searching
questions of themselves. "You have better food and raiment than
was in former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but
have you better hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas
Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains that "Faith is
dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election
sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride.
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