PREFACE
PREFACE
The four years of the great war have witnessed two astounding facts, namely, the recrudescence of an ancient barbarism and the world-wide application of the ideals of Christianity. During these momentous times the frontiers of barbarism and of civilization were clearly marked. The greater part of the world declared its position and took sides with one or other of the contestants. The whole world was either for or against, either friend or foe to, the essential principles of a Christian civilization.
It was no accident that the torch of the Hun and the Cross of the Christ should meet again on the old historic battle-ground between the Somme and the Rhine, and especially at the Marne. We thank God in victory’s hour that the Cross of the Christ is again triumphant, and we trust the torch of the Hun is extinguished forever. Autocracy’s serpent head has been crushed beneath the heel of a militant democracy. That bruised heel is our reminder of the cost of victory. It staggers the imagination to state in terms of manhood, materials, and money the price we have paid to make a world safe for democracy.
The eyes of a world have been opened. Men have thought of Calvary, the price the Son of God paid to redeem the wayward, wicked world. Men through their Calvary have come to understand the message of Christ’s Cross—that all men are of equal value in the sight of humanity’s God, and therefore are entitled to equal privileges in the world he has made for their happiness. Out from the shambles of these war-torn years there has come forth, slowly and certainly, with ever-increasing clearness, the shining form of the ideal supreme, the truth triumphant, the principle of full, free, absolute soul-liberty.
As the thirsty caravan turns to the springs, as the mariner turns to his compass in the darkest night, so the war-weary world—all parts of it, both that of friend and that of foe—looks beseechingly to America and to the ideal of which she is the great exemplar. From her shores there went forth an army which under God turned the tide against barbarism and madepossible the final victory for civilization. That army was composed of men whose fathers represented every nation under heaven. Some who received the highest honor for distinguished service were born under the very flags they sought to overthrow. It was humanity’s army, dominated by ideals distinctly American, which fought, not for military glory, not for hellish hatred, not for selfish gain, but as the crusaders of a new order, of an international fraternity.
The distinctive feature of America’s greatness is not her boundless wealth, not her limitless resources, not her inimitable versatility. It is the ideal which she has inherited from her fathers. That ideal, in the forefront of the world’s thought today, had its yesterday of suffering and of sacrifice.
It is timely in the hour of democracy’s triumph to turn our thoughts toward the genesis of soul-liberty in America. Today millions of men espouse her sacred cause. In the dawn of American history, in the early colonial times, a misunderstood, maligned, and persecuted refugee, Roger Williams, stood almost alone as her defender. Driven from motherland and from adopted home, he found among the savages of the wilderness a place where he could live out his principles of soul-liberty and grant freely to others what he desired for himself. He has been rightly called “The First American,” because he was the first to actualize in a commonwealth the distinctively American principle of freedom for mind and body and soul.
Roger Williams was not the discoverer of the principle of soul-liberty. What Jesus did and said was the torch of truth destined to illumine the whole world. His death on the cross was the voice of God in eloquent terms, telling us that all men were equal sharers in his love and entitled to equal opportunities and privileges in the world which he had made for man’s well-being. Christ taught clearly that men should not force others to belief in him or to Christian conduct, nor destroy those who failed to follow his teachings as they saw them.
For centuries faithful witnesses kept alive in the world these precious truths. In fact, for a millennium the name Anabaptist or Baptist was synonymous with soul-liberty. Baptists on the Continent and in England sowed broadcast these seeds which led to a glorious harvest in the new world. After the death of RogerWilliams the Baptists in the colonies continued the work so nobly begun by him. In the face of bitterest persecution they labored for a century before the much-desired principle of soul-liberty was interwoven into our National Constitution and protected by the First Amendment.
Our Western Hemisphere represents two types of civilization. The Rio Grande is the dividing line between a civilization which is Baptist in its distinctive and essential character and one which is non-Baptist. To the north we see what the democracy of the soul can do when associated with the democracy of political rights. To the south we see but the twilight of civilization, a place where there is political democracy in name, but where it is rendered powerless because the mind and soul do not enjoy full freedom. It is the difference between religious democracy and religious autocracy. To the north the Bible is loved, it is studied freely, and its principles are followed. It is a land where the Bible is unchained and where the prevailing religions are of a church without a bishop in a land without a king. To the south the Bible is practically suppressed, its study is discouraged, and its truths go unheeded.
Europe, thou art looking across the seas to America. Look to all three Americas. Political democracy is universal in North, Central, and South America. Ask thyself the question, Why is the civilization of the north so attractive? It is because Religious Liberty is married to Political Liberty. Dost thou want our blessedness? Then see to it that thy new-born democracies and thine ancient ones have complete soul-liberty. Give the Bible a chance to bless thy stricken lands. Let the truths from God’s book do their revolutionary work for thee as they have for God’s liberty land on this side of the sea.
Religious liberty has unchained the Bible, scattered the darkness of superstition, flooded our continent with light and blessing. It has toppled selfish autocrats from their thrones, it has unlocked the shackles from the feet of millions who were living in spiritual and physical slavery. Religious liberty opens the doors and lets God’s sunlight of truth enter to warm and bless the world.
To Roger Williams and the historic Baptist denomination we turn for the story of the genesis and growth of this great blessing in America. There is an effort, in evidence in the secularand religious press of America, and, in some sections, in many of our public schools, to rob both Williams and the Baptists of their crown of glory. In certain quarters both Protestants and Catholics are attributing the honor of giving birth to religious liberty to communions which centuries ago persecuted our Baptist forefathers unto banishment and death.
The early American Colonies can be divided into three classes. One class included those who sought for uniformity in religion. Exile and death were resorted to to make that religious uniformity possible. Baptists were martyred in Massachusetts and Virginia. Another class included those who granted a toleration to other Christian religions, but who denied political privileges to Jews, infidels, or Unitarians. Maryland and Pennsylvania, although far advanced from the persecuting spirit of some of the colonies, belong to this second class. There was another class, represented at first by the smallest of the colonies, little Baptist Rhode Island, which gave full, absolute, religious liberty. No political privilege was dependent on religious belief. The attitude of the early colonists to the Jews is the acid test of their claim to priority as the advocates of soul-liberty in America.
Hebrew scholars and statesmen do not hesitate to give their tribute of honor to Roger Williams and the Baptists. The Hon. Oscar S. Straus, twice American Ambassador to Turkey, Secretary of Labor and Commerce in the late President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and President of the League to Enforce Peace, said on January 13, 1919, on the eve of sailing for Europe and the Peace Conference:
If I were asked to select from all the great men who have left their impress upon this continent from the days that the Puritan Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock, until the time when only a few days ago we laid to rest the greatest American in our generation—Theodore Roosevelt; if I were asked whom to hold before the American people and the world to typify the American spirit of fairness, of freedom, of liberty in Church and State, I would without any hesitation select that great prophet who established the first political community on the basis of a free Church in a free State, the great and immortal Roger Williams.... He became a Baptist, or as they were then called, Anabaptist, because to his spirit and ideals the Baptist faith approached nearer than any other—a community and a church which is famous for never having stained its hands with the blood of persecutors.
If I were asked to select from all the great men who have left their impress upon this continent from the days that the Puritan Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock, until the time when only a few days ago we laid to rest the greatest American in our generation—Theodore Roosevelt; if I were asked whom to hold before the American people and the world to typify the American spirit of fairness, of freedom, of liberty in Church and State, I would without any hesitation select that great prophet who established the first political community on the basis of a free Church in a free State, the great and immortal Roger Williams.... He became a Baptist, or as they were then called, Anabaptist, because to his spirit and ideals the Baptist faith approached nearer than any other—a community and a church which is famous for never having stained its hands with the blood of persecutors.