The ministers, all or nearly all of whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered in America.

They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.
In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was illustrated.

With the least possible constraint on the individual or on the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state should have its established church.
Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested has been abundantly told and retold.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned, eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, was a very malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family prayers.

After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of mutual respect and love.

A little later, a clever woman, Mrs.Ann Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace, demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether ecclesiastical or civil.