"[Roger] Williams may have been using the name Magna Carta for his own rhetorical purposes. But the idea of a second Magna Carta that would protect basic freedoms beyond the original came in a very short time to be taken seriously by various religious dissenters, first in England, and then in the American colonies. It seems that Williams’s fortuitous rhetorical phrase may have helped prod existing reform movements towards the idea of a new, or second, Magna Carta, one that would protect religious freedom and individual conscience."