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Obadiah Holmes (1610 - 15 October 1682) was an early Rhode Island settler, and a Baptist minister who was whipped in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his religious beliefs and activism. He became the pastor of the Baptist Church in Newport, Rhode Island, a position he held for 30 years. Born in 1610 near Manchester, England, he grew up in a family where several of his brothers were sent to college at Oxford, but he was somewhat wild in his youth, and saw his rebelliousness as being a cause of his mother's death. He was married at the age of 20, and several years later emigrated from England to settle in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He and two others began a glass making business there, but by 1645, perhaps due to religious friction, he moved to Rehoboth in the Plymouth Colony. Religious differences evolved between himself and Samuel Newman, the pastor of the Rehoboth church, and Holmes eventually became the leader of a small faction within the church sometimes called the "Schismists." In 1650 he and others were taken to court for their religious views and practices, and compelled to leave the colony. He settled in Newport in the Rhode Island colony and soon befriended John Clarke and John Crandall. In July 1651 these three men, while visiting an elderly friend in Lynn, Massachusetts, were apprehended, tried, and given exorbitant fines for their religious practices. Friends paid the fines for Clarke and Crandall, but when Holmes learned of this he refused to allow them to pay his fine. Six weeks after trial he was taken to the whipping post in Boston and given 30 strokes, which were laid on so harshly that for weeks afterward Holmes could only sleep while on his knees and elbows. The year after this punishment Holmes became the pastor of the Baptist church in Newport, and continuously held that position for 30 years, until his death in 1682. Holmes and his wife Katharine had nine known children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. He was an ancestor of United States President Abraham Lincoln. == Ancestry and life in England == Baptized in Didsbury, Lancashire, England on 18 March 1609/10, Obadiah Holmes was the son of Robert Hulme (baptized 18 August 1578), a husbandman living in Reddish, Lancashire, and the grandson of an earlier Robert Hulme who was buried at Stockport on 14 January 1604/5. His mother's name was Katherine Johnson and she married his father at Stockport on 8 October 1605. While Holmes' birth date is widely given as about 1607, based on his own recollection (on 20 December 1675 he called himself aged 69, "there or thereabouts") baptisms during that timeframe, almost without exception, took place within a week of a birth, and the baptismal date is considered far more reliable than the memory of an old man. Holmes was married at the Collegiate church of Manchester on 20 November 1630 to Katherine Hyde. His two brothers, Samuel and John, attended Brasenose College in Oxford, and Samuel received his Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1636. In his writings, Holmes mentions another brother, Robert, but it is not clear whether it was Obadiah or Robert who attended college in Oxford as the third of three sons of his parents who went there. Most early writers on the subject assume that Holmes had spent some time at Oxford. In a 1675 writing about his early life, Holmes is very revealing about his character as a youth, writing, "Three sons they (parents ) brought up aright to the university at Oxford but the most of their care was to inform and to instruct them in the fear of the Lord and to that end gave them much good counsell (), bringing them often before the Lord by earnest prayer, but I the most rebellious of all did neither harken to counsel nor any instruction, for from a child I minded nothing but folly, and vanity... I was not only rebellious against my parents but against the Lord...continuing in such a course for four or five years... my rebellion to my honored parents then looked me in open face, and my dear mother being sick it struck me my disobedience caused her death, which forced me to confess the same to her, my evil ways and danger." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Obadiah Holmes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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