III

THE HISTORIC CUSTODIANS OFSOUL-LIBERTY

Roger Williams must forever rank as one of the great epoch-makers of the world, and to him impartial historians accord the honor of being the first democrat. It was not until his expulsion from Salem Colony that he became a Baptist, but the evidence is indisputable that he had long been a Baptist at heart. He had spent much time among the Baptists in England and was familiar with their doctrines and writings. No sooner had Williams set foot in America than he found himself in conflict with the authorities, both civil and religious.—S. Z. Batten, in “The Christian State.”

There is not a confession of faith, nor a creed, framed by any of the Reformers, which does not give the magistrate a coercive power in religion, and almost every one at the same time curses the resisting Baptists.—E. B. Underhill, in “Struggles and Triumphs.”

Godly princes may lawfully issue edicts for compelling obstinate and rebellious persons to worship the true God and to maintain the unity of the faith.—Calvin.

Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for Church or Commonwealth.... As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved, and directed in Scripture.—John Cotton.

It is said that Men ought to have Liberty of their Conscience, and that it is Persecution to debar them of it; I can stand amazed than reply to this: It is an astonishment to think that the brains of men should be parboiled in such impious ignorance.—Rev. Nathaniel Ward, Lawyer Divine, of Ipswich, who drew up the first legal code for Massachusetts Bay Colony.

ROGER WILLIAMS, both minister and citizen, probably led the Providence planters in their religious activities. He was neither identified with the Established Church of England, nor in sympathy with the intolerance of the new established order at Boston and Salem, or even the one at Plymouth. He was a Separatist of the most pronounced type, and that was exactly the accredited Baptist position. He was one with the Baptists in his ideas concerning a complete separation from the State Church of England, one with them in the absolute separation of Church and State, one with them in insisting upon a regenerate church-membership. So according to the logic of the situation he turned to the Baptist movement. He may have been instructed as to their position by Mrs. Scott (the sister of the Antinomian, Mrs. Ann Hutchinson), who came to Providence shortly before the baptism of Williams. Roger Williams had been accused of tendencies toward the Anabaptists while in Plymouth, Salem, and Boston. Before he met Mrs. Scott, however, he held the Baptist positions of the time. It is not unlikely that she, being an intelligent Baptist, showed Williams the remarkable similarity between his position and that of the Baptists. Some time before March, 1639, Williams was baptized. In the absence of a Baptist minister, Ezekiel Holliman, an exile from Salem, baptized Roger Williams, who in turn baptized Mr. Holliman and some ten others. Like the disciple band of old the Baptist movement in Providence and America commenced with a band of twelve disciples. Their names are as follows: Roger Williams, Ezekiel Holliman, William Arnold (?),[1]William Harris, Stukely Westcott, John Green, Richard Waterman, Thomas James, Robert Cole, William Carpenter (?), Francis Weston, and Thomas Olney. Thus was organized the First Baptist Church in America.

[1]The “?” is after Arnold’s name in First Baptist Church Register.

Great was the consternation in Salem when news reached there of the baptism of Williams and others who had been members of their church. The Puritan church took action at once. The letter announcing to the church at Dorchester the exclusion of the offenders is interesting:

Reverend and dearly beloved in the Lord:We thought it our bounden duty to acquaint you with the names of such persons, as have had the great censure passed upon them, in this our church, with the reasons thereof, beseeching you in the Lord, not only to read their names in public to yours, but also to give us the like notice of any dealt with in like manner by you, so that we may walk toward them accordingly, for some of us here have had communion ignorantly with some of other churches. 2 Thess. 3:14. We can do no less than have such noted as disobey the truth.Roger Williams and his wife, John Throckmorton and his wife, Thomas Olney and his wife, Stukely Westcott and his wife, Mary Holliman, Widow Reeves.These wholly refused to hear the church, denying it, and all the churches in the Bay, to be true churches, and (except two) are all rebaptized.

Reverend and dearly beloved in the Lord:

We thought it our bounden duty to acquaint you with the names of such persons, as have had the great censure passed upon them, in this our church, with the reasons thereof, beseeching you in the Lord, not only to read their names in public to yours, but also to give us the like notice of any dealt with in like manner by you, so that we may walk toward them accordingly, for some of us here have had communion ignorantly with some of other churches. 2 Thess. 3:14. We can do no less than have such noted as disobey the truth.

Roger Williams and his wife, John Throckmorton and his wife, Thomas Olney and his wife, Stukely Westcott and his wife, Mary Holliman, Widow Reeves.

These wholly refused to hear the church, denying it, and all the churches in the Bay, to be true churches, and (except two) are all rebaptized.

After some time Roger Williams left the Baptist church he had organized in Providence. Because of this fact many have asked the question, “Was Roger Williams after all a Baptist?” His life-story reveals the fact that he held the Baptist views before he left Plymouth. Elder Brewster detected the Baptist heresy in his teaching to the people of the Pilgrim colony and warned the leaders of the Bay Colony of this tendency to “Anabaptistery.” Williams’ ministry in the Bay Colony reveals the fact that he was against everything which was related to the Episcopacy or that might even lead to a “presbytery.” He refused to minister to the Boston church because it was related to the Episcopal State Church of England. He also questioned the propriety of the ministers’ conference in New England, for fear they might establish a presbytery which would rob the local church of its congregational privileges. His whole life in America was universally true to the accepted Baptist position relative to church polity.

At the time of Williams’ baptism, English Baptists were agitated in regard to the proper administrators of Christian baptism. Many crossed to the Continent and were baptized by ministersin Holland. Williams was soon troubled also in regard to the same question. Was he properly baptized? That was the question which confronted him. He would not juggle with his conscience. He knew of no Baptist minister or baptized believer ordained to the ministry in America when he was baptized. His own baptism was by an unbaptized person. He made diligent study of the question and could not satisfy his mind that there was a real succession of proper administrators. In the awful decline of the church he was convinced that the sacred succession had been broken. He believed that either that succession must be in existence, or God must raise up a new “apostolate,” to commence again the sacred succession. True to principle, he felt he must withdraw from the church at Providence. In the years which followed nothing which he said or did ever changed the facts that he was the first recognized pastor of the first Baptist church that was organized in America, that he was the first known case in America of a believer being immersed upon profession of faith into the fellowship of a local Baptist church, and that he was the organizer of the first Baptist church in America.

In the years which followed his separation from the church at Providence, he left no uncertainty as to his Baptist views on every question save that of the proper administrator of baptism and its kindred subject of ordination. In all other views he was a loyal Baptist until his death. In his day, the Baptists were divided into two recognized divisions, namely, Particular and General Baptists. Dr. Henry M. King, of Providence, one of the successors of Roger Williams in the pastorate of the Providence church, describes Roger Williams as a “High-church Baptist.”

The late Reuben A. Guild, for many years librarian of Brown University Library, and a thorough student of the original sources of information, writes thus of Roger Williams in his history of Brown University:

In regard to the other great doctrines held by the Baptists, liberty of conscience, or soul-liberty, the entire separation of Church and State, the supreme headship of Christ in all spiritual matters, regeneration through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and a hearty belief in the Bible as God’s divinely inspired and miraculously preserved word and the all-sufficientrule for faith and practice, he was throughout life a sincere believer in them all and an earnest advocate of them, as his letters and published works abundantly show.

In Williams’ book, “Christenings make not Christians,” we have the most radical Baptist teaching in regard to the errors of infant sprinkling. He attacked the very foundation of the pedobaptists. He insisted that only the regeneration of the heart, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, could make any person a Christian.

He believed that believers’ immersion is the New Testament baptism. In a letter to Governor Winthrop, dated December 10, 1649, he writes:

Mr. John Clarke hath been here lately and hath dipped them. I believe their practice comes nearer the practice of our great Founder, Jesus Christ, than any other practices of religion do.

In his debate with Fox, he writes thus, eleven years prior to his death:

That gallant and heavenly and fundamental principle of the true matter of a Christian congregation, flock or society, namely, actual believers, true disciples and converts, such as can give an account of how the grace of God hath appeared unto them.

We should think of Roger Williams as a man chosen of God to be champion of a great distinctive Baptist doctrine held by the Baptists centuries prior to his day and taught by the Baptists after his time until it was made an essential part of our national Constitution. Released from pastoral duties, Roger Williams gave himself completely to the task of establishing and guarding the sacred fires of soul-liberty which he had kindled in Rhode Island. For this sacred cause he sacrificed his comfortable home at Salem and devoted the earnings of a lifetime in trips to England to secure parliamentary protection for the colony when envious neighbors on all sides were coveting his purchased possessions. He sacrificed his opportunity to become wealthy and died a poor man. All honor to John Clarke, physician and pastor at Newport, for the splendid cooperation which he gave to Williams. They were comrades, not rivals for fame in those days. They were happy in life and should not be madeenemies in death. Their names should be linked together as the pioneers and perfecters of soul-liberty in Rhode Island.

Christeningsmake notCHRISTIANS,ORA Briefe Discourse concerning thatnameHeathen, commonly given totheIndians.As also concerning that great point of theirCONVERSION.Published according to Order.London, Printed byIane Coe, for I. H. 1645.

The History of the First Baptist Church

The early Providence Baptists met at first in a grove under the trees. In inclement weather they would meet in private homes. They adopted no articles of faith, and to this day the First Church of Providence has been without a formal creed or covenant. For sixty years the church founded by Roger Williams had no house of worship. Pardon Tillinghast, its sixth pastor, built them a house of worship in 1700 and deeded it to the Society in 1711. It stood on the corner of North Main and Smith Streets. A larger church, forty feet square, built in 1726, succeeded this first edifice. The present edifice was built in 1775, and was dedicated “for the worship of Almighty God and to hold commencements in.” It cost $35,000, a part of which was raised by a lottery, authorized by the State. The building was designed by Joseph Brown and James Sumner, who used as a model Gibb’s church in London,St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It is recognized as one of the finest examples of colonial architecture in America.

It has a beautiful interior. The upper gallery at the west end was originally set apart for slaves and colored people. It was removed to give place for the pipe-organ in 1832. The same year the old-fashioned square pews were exchanged for the present ones; the lofty pulpit and sounding-board were taken down. The beautiful crystal chandelier, imported from England in 1792 was lighted for the first time when Hope Brown, daughter of Nicholas Brown, was married to Thomas Poynton Ives. It was the bride’s gift to the church.

The bell in the tower weighs two thousand five hundred pounds, and bore originally this inscription:

For freedom of conscience the town was first planted;Persuasion, not force, was used by the people;This church is the eldest, and has not recanted,Enjoying and granting bell, temple, and steeple.

For freedom of conscience the town was first planted;

Persuasion, not force, was used by the people;

This church is the eldest, and has not recanted,

Enjoying and granting bell, temple, and steeple.

It has been cracked three times and recast in this country. It now bears the date of the origin of the church, and the nameof Roger Williams, “its first pastor and the first asserter of liberty of conscience.” The bell is rung at sunrise, at midday, and at nine o’clock as in the days of old.

First Baptist Church of Providence

Roger Mowry’s “Ordinarie.” Built 1653,Demolished 1900

In the vestries are pictures of many of the former leaders of this historic church. In the hallway, in a glass case, is a piece of the original “What Cheer Rock,” the landing-place of Williams. At the entrance to the church a bronze tablet commemorates the fact that the First Baptist Church of Providence was the first Baptist church established in America and that Roger Williams was its first pastor.

The present organization, known as the First Baptist Church of Providence, has every valid reason for claiming to be the true successor of the original church, organized before 1639, by Roger Williams. In the Rhode Island Baptist State Annual the date of the church’s organization is given as 1638. A committee appointed by the church, when reporting, on March 16, 1899, the reasons for claiming that the present organization is the true successor of the first Baptist church organized in America, quoted in defense of this position the following writers: Arnold, “History of Rhode Island”; Caldwell, “History of the First Baptist Church”; Guild, “History of Brown University and Manning”; Prof. Geo. P. Fisher, of Yale, “In Colonial Era”; Cramp, “Baptist History”; Dexter, “As to Roger Williams”; Morgan Edwards, “Materials for a History of Baptists in Rhode Island.” In the following fall this report was also presented to the Warren Association and was ordered printed in the Minutes of the Association.

In the “Historical Catalogue” of this church, a book prepared by a committee consisting of Rev. H. M. King, D. D., Pres. W. H. P. Faunce, Prof. Wm. C. Poland, and others, a committee familiar with the original sources of information, we find Roger Williams listed as the first member in its list of members and as the first pastor in its list of pastors. The bronze tablet in front of the present meeting-house and the inscription on the bell both state that Roger Williams was the first pastor.

Roger Williams’ Ideal, a Distinctive Baptist Principle

We have already noted the fact that Roger Williams was accused of Anabaptist tendencies. The Baptists, or Anabaptists,throughout the ages have stood for the most advanced principles of Protestantism. They existed long before Luther. Many historians claim for them a historic continuity from the days of the early Christians. Their principles—democracy of the local church, sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the authority of the Scriptures—have been perpetuated by local distinct bodies rather than by the historic continuity of a general denomination with a common name and a common governing body.

The Master, in the parable of the Tares, taught the principle advocated by the Baptists and by Roger Williams. The field is the world; the good seed, the children of the kingdom; the tares are the evil-doers. Wheat and tares should be allowed to grow together in the world (not in the church) until the end of the age, when the angels, the reapers of God, will gather them together for reward or punishment. Force must never be used to make disciples for Christ.

In the early Christian centuries, the church longed for liberty to live for Christ and preach his gospel. Ten great general persecutions were launched by the Roman emperors to crush the church. The promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against it was realized. The Edict of Milan, issued in 313, by Constantine and Licinius, joint emperors, gave the church an opportunity to grow and prosper and it was soon in the lead throughout the Roman Empire. Then the church turned persecutor and put to death those who differed from the ruling order, which now had lost its democratic ideals. When the Montanists, the Donatists, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses in turn resisted the evil tendencies and assumptions of a corrupt church, they were persecuted with a fierceness greater than that formerly waged by the pagans against the church. The principle of religious liberty was almost lost. It became the far-off dream of idealists. These dreamers were usually called Anabaptists. At first they were dissenters from Roman Catholicism, but afterward they were also dissenters from the dominant forms of Protestantism.

Interior of First Baptist Church, Providence

The Protestant Reformation was a case of arrested development. It was like the exodus from the Egyptian bondage. There was a long lingering in the wilderness before the day dawned with full religious liberty. Henry Melville King says:

The absolute supremacy of the word of God, the spiritual nature of the Christian church, the Christian ordinances for believing souls, the divorce of Church and State, full, unrestricted religious freedom for every man, these essential truths of the gospel of Christ found no room at the inn of the sixteenth century, and were thrust aside into the manger ... the inn was not open for it, but the manger was. The principle of religious liberty did not fail to get born.

The Anabaptists of Europe kept alive the ideals of religious liberty. They sought to carry out the principles of the Protestant Reformation to its scriptural and logical conclusion. Many, called by this name, had little in common with the movement which now bears the Baptist name. The actions of the fanatics under Münzer have been cited since Williams’ day as an argument against his principles. Münzer, who “never submitted to, nor administered rebaptism, who persisted in baptizing infants, and who sought to set up the kingdom of Christ by carnal warfare, was not correctly classed.” Cornelius, Roman Catholic historian of the Münzer uprising, shows that the Anabaptists repudiated the actions of this fanatic.

The only crime of which they (the Baptists) were accused as a body by their contemporaries, and which is substantiated by evidence, the crime for which they were inhumanly persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, and for which they went cheerfully and in large numbers to death by drowning or the stake, was the crime of advocating soul-liberty. They claimed the right to interpret the Scriptures for themselves. They demanded freedom of faith and worship for all men. They apprehended the sublime doctrine of civil and religious liberty, and they werethe onlymen who did apprehend it.

Most of the creeds and confessions of the Reformation gave to the magistrate a coercive power in religion, and included a curse for the despised Baptists. Luther, in the early years of his Reformation work, said:

No one can command or ought to command the soul except God, who alone can show it the way to heaven. It is futile and impossible to command, or by force to compel any man’s belief. Heresy is a spiritual thing, which no iron can hew down, no fire burn, no water drown... Whenever the temporal power presumes to legislate for the soul, it encroaches.

Luther, when he was successful, turned his back upon this noble utterance and compromised with error. He stopped short offull victory and failed to secure the “full splendor of a complete triumph.” He wrote differently in after days:

Since it is not good that in one parish the people should be exposed to contradictory preaching, he (the magistrate) should order to be silent whatever does not consist with the Scriptures.

Thus the civil ruler was made the final judge of truth and given power to suppress what he would condemn. This was a case of tyranny changing hands. Luther wrote to Menius and Myconius in 1530:

I am pleased that you intend to publish a book against the Anabaptists as soon as possible. Since they are not only blasphemous but also seditious men, let the sword exercise its rights over them, for it is the will of God, that he shall have judgment who resisteth the power.

Melanchthon, in a letter to the Diet at Hamburg, in 1537, advised death by the sword to all who professed Anabaptist views. Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, whose statue in Zurich pictures him with a Bible in his right hand and a sword in his left, also persecuted the Baptists. On January 5, 1527, Felix Mantz became the first Swiss Anabaptist martyr by drowning at Zurich. This was a hideous parody of his belief in believers’ baptism by immersion. Heinrich Bullinger, in his book against the Anabaptists, specifies thirteen distinct sects among the Anabaptists. He mentions twenty-five points of agreement among them, including the following:

That secular authority has no concern with religious belief; that the Christian resists no evil and therefore needs no law-courts; nor should ever make use of the tribunals; that Christians do not kill or punish with imprisonment or the sword, but only with exclusion from the body of believers; that no man should be compelled by force to believe, nor should any be slain on account of his faith; that Christians donotresist, and hence do not go to war; that Christians may not swear; that all oaths are sinful; that infant baptism is of the pope and devil; that rebaptism, or better, adult baptism, is the only true Christian baptism.

In 1527, the Swiss Anabaptists issued a confession of faith at Schaffhausen. Its writer was Michael Sattler, an ex-monk who was martyred that same year. It was the first confession “in which Christian men claimed absolute religious freedom forthemselves, and guaranteed absolute religious freedom to others.” This Baptist movement was the target of Protestant and Catholic persecution alike and its brave, spiritual men and women were driven to the martyr’s crown or to exile. Many fled to Holland. The torch of truth, the advanced ideas which they had received from the Waldensians and other pre-Reformation movements, were handed over to the Anabaptists of Holland. These increased in number rapidly under the toleration afforded them in that country. Menno Simons, a Roman priest, set to thinking by the martyrdoms about him, espoused their cause and doctrines. Baptized at the age of forty-four, he fled to Holland, where he became the leader of a host, which afterward bore his name, being called Mennonites. Charles V persecuted these Baptists, and fully fifty thousand were martyred. They were not exterminated, however, for God, as in other days, preserved a remnant to pass the torch of religious liberty on to others.

Bell of First Baptist Church, Providence

Baptist refugees from Holland crossed over to England. Henry VIII, when he made himself head of the Church, ordered their arrest and banishment from the kingdom, “on pain to suffer death, if they abide, and be apprehended and taken.” The fires of Smithfield and the inquisition of the Protestants could not crush this movement destined of God, at a later date, to change the world. Considered an obnoxious sect in the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, they carried on their meetings secretly. They were an industrious class of skilled mechanics and introduced into England that which afterward gave that nation its commercial and manufacturing supremacy. The English passed a law that each foreign workman should take and train one English apprentice. As a result, fifty thousand English lads were trained, not only mechanically, but also in the principles of these Dutch Anabaptists. This spiritual training led to the Puritan revolution in England and to the greater movement across the seas. Each of these Dutch Baptist churches was a republic in itself, independent with its popularly elected officers, deacons, and elders. They held, as a cardinal doctrine, the separation of Church and State. From the sections in which these Dutch Anabaptists lived came fully fifty per cent of the early colonists to the New World. Fourteen English towns, in which they formed a large proportion of the population, areduplicated by New England towns of the same name. From the same district Cromwell recruited his invincible Ironsides. Back of all that was good and noble in the settlements at Plymouth and Boston and in Connecticut was the leaven of the Dutch Baptists in that part of England from which these early colonists came.

Robert Browne, who is the reputed founder of English Congregationalism, advocated his peculiar views after dwelling for some time in a Dutch Anabaptist community. Here he promulgated his ideas. A part of his congregation fled to Middleburg, a Baptist stronghold. After two years he quarreled with these folks and returned to England, where he became reconciled to the Established Church and for forty years afterward administered to an Established Church parish. The Baptist principle, however, had been stamped upon the few years of his ministry when he started a new order.

At the close of the sixteenth century most of the Anabaptists in England were Dutch. Slowly, however, English Baptists were coming into existence, and they soon formed themselves into small groups. Browne did not go so far as the Baptists, but in church government he took their New Testament position. As far as is known, the first definite English Baptist church was organized in London in 1611, with Thomas Helwys as pastor. The members had been exiles in Holland and were baptized there by Rev. John Smith, the famous Se-Baptist, formerly a Church of England clergyman.

This English Baptist church formulated a confession which contains the first declaration of faith to include, as the teaching of Christ, the absolute separation of Church and State.

The magistrate by virtue of his office, is not to meddle with religion or matters of conscience, nor to compel men to this or that form of religion or doctrine; but to leave the Christian religion free to every man’s conscience.

Prof. Mason says:

It was, in short, from their little dingy meeting-house, somewhere in old London, that there flashed out, first in England, the absolute doctrine of religious liberty.

These of whom mention has just been made, were called General Baptists.

In 1644, the Particular Baptists issued a confession, equally explicit and clear. Religious liberty to them was the right, and good citizenship the duty, of every Christian man. Their historic confession, a confession of seven associated churches, was the first declaration, in England or in Christendom, by a body of associated churches on the question of absolute religious liberty. Many of these Baptists were imprisoned.

Many denominations which today favor religious liberty, were opposed to it in those days of Baptist persecution. For example, the Presbyterian ministers of Lancashire declared, “A toleration would be putting a sword in a madman’s hands, a cup of poison into the hand of a child, a letting loose of madmen with firebrands in their hands, etc.” The Presbyterians, then, would gladly have been a national church. The Puritans of the Bay Colony had no higher thought than a theocracy for themselves. To insure uniformity of worship in their colony they resorted to whippings, banishments, fines, and hangings. The Pilgrim Fathers were farther advanced, but historians fail to find that they had a higher ideal than to secure a freedom to worship God for themselves. They certainly never dreamed of extending an equal freedom to all who differed from them in religious opinions. John Robinson, the renowned pastor of the Pilgrims, defended earnestly the use of the magistrate’s power “to punish religious actions, he (the magistrate) being the preserver of both tables, and so to punish all breaches of both.”

By Protestants, with the exception of the Baptists, full religious toleration and liberty was feared and hated. The most advanced were far from the Baptist position. This explains the bitterness of the persecution against Roger Williams and the Baptists. In fact, Roger Williams was so far in advance of his age, and that in common with the noble host of martyred Baptists, that he seemed dwarfed in the distance. The future even more than the present time will enable us to value his and their worth.

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