BAPTIST SPARKS FROM A HEBREW ANVIL
BAPTIST SPARKS FROM A HEBREW ANVIL
“Even the absence of a definite experiment must not deter him. He would create a society where the principles would be put to the test. He would fashion a State where the Church and the crown would be mutually helpful though independent. He would create a condition of humanity where the sovereignty of the soul before God would be respected, and where every man, believer or disbeliever, Gentile, Jew, or Turk, would have untrammeled opportunity for the display and exercise of the faith within him. Here lies the core of his heroism!”
“Even the absence of a definite experiment must not deter him. He would create a society where the principles would be put to the test. He would fashion a State where the Church and the crown would be mutually helpful though independent. He would create a condition of humanity where the sovereignty of the soul before God would be respected, and where every man, believer or disbeliever, Gentile, Jew, or Turk, would have untrammeled opportunity for the display and exercise of the faith within him. Here lies the core of his heroism!”
CONCERNING THE MONUMENT ATROGER WILLIAMS PARK
“This one monument speaks the gratitude of one State. But the whole country has an eloquent voice of appreciation. Even as the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren, the builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intones the larger praise when it says, ‘If you would see his monument, look around you,’ so would we point to the great principles of equal and religious freedom, written into the Constitution of forty-eight States, and engraven on the minds of ninety millions of people in our country and making their moral and civic influence felt all over the civilized globe, as worthy tributes to the genius of Roger Williams.”—Extracts from Thanksgiving Address on “Roger Williams,” delivered by Rabbi Abram Simon, Ph. D., to Reformed Congregation Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, November 24, 1912.
“This one monument speaks the gratitude of one State. But the whole country has an eloquent voice of appreciation. Even as the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren, the builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intones the larger praise when it says, ‘If you would see his monument, look around you,’ so would we point to the great principles of equal and religious freedom, written into the Constitution of forty-eight States, and engraven on the minds of ninety millions of people in our country and making their moral and civic influence felt all over the civilized globe, as worthy tributes to the genius of Roger Williams.”
—Extracts from Thanksgiving Address on “Roger Williams,” delivered by Rabbi Abram Simon, Ph. D., to Reformed Congregation Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, November 24, 1912.