VII

THE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE OFROGER WILLIAMS’ IDEAL

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon trusted foundations of political liberty.”—President Wilson’s War Message to Congress, 1917.

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.—Alfred Tennyson.

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

—Alfred Tennyson.

A day will come when bullets and bombs shall be replaced by ballots, by the universal suffrages of the people, by the sacred arbitrament of a great Sovereign Senate.... A day will come when we shall face those two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, in face of each other, extending hand to hand over the ocean, exchanging their products, their commerce, their industry, their art, their genius clearing the earth, colonizing deserts, and ameliorating creation under the eye of the Creator. To you, I appeal, French, English, Germans, Russians, Slavs, Europeans, Americans, what have we to do to hasten the coming of the great day?Love one another.—Victor Hugo.

I asked him (Premier Lloyd George) what message he would send to American Baptists. Quick as a flash, he turned and said: “Tell them that it is Baptist principles that we are fighting for in this great struggle. All that Baptists count dear is at stake in this issue.”—Lloyd George to George Coleman, President, Northern Baptist Convention. From the latter’s speech at Atlantic City, N. J., May, 1918.

ROGER Williams, as a man of vision, was experimenting with a new idealism. His ideas, now generally accepted, have made absolute religious liberty, with its complete separation of Church and State, an idea almost synonymous with the name of the United States of America. That lonely man, in the smallest of the colonies, set the pace for the other twelve original commonwealths and established a national pattern for the forty-eight States in the present Union. Our cup of blessing has overflowed, and today the whole world is awaking to the blessings in store for them if they partake of the same privileges.

“Mankind has pursued liberty over mountain and across valley,” writes Pres. E. Y. Mullins,

by land and by sea, through fire and through flood, since the first man caught a glimpse of liberty’s white robes leading on to victory. The love of victory is now a volcanic fire which breaks out into revolution and consumes and destroys the ancient fabrics of government, and now it is a tide of life which rolls across the face of nations, causing them to burst into the beauty and fragrance of a new springtime. The spirit of liberty in its quest for the goal of its desire has sounded all the notes in the gamut of human experience, from the minor notes of abject despair to the ringing pæan of victory over every foe.

The Baptist churches of America, the torch-bearers of religious or soul-liberty, have grown from the one church which Williams founded in Providence into a mighty host. From twelve members in one church organization in 1639 that denomination has grown in America until today, according to the latest government statistics, it has the largest membership of any Protestant denomination in America, 7,236,650. Its one preacher has become a great host of 39,734, serving 53,133 churches. Instead of one college with one student in 1764, it now has 463 schools in America, with 68,513 students. Instead of one lone missionaryto the Indians, it now has a large army of missionaries in the home and foreign fields.

Doctor Masters, Secretary of Publicity of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, in tabulating the figures from the preliminary statistics furnished by the United States Census Department, calls our attention to the fact that the approximate Baptist population of America, including members and other adherents, is twenty-two millions. The Baptists are thus in the lead of every denomination, Catholic or Protestant, in America; our net gain for ten years is the greatest of all denominations, 28 per cent, compared with 10.8 per cent of the Roman Catholics. He gives the comparative strength of Romanists and evangelicals in America as eighty million evangelicals to 15,700,000 Roman Catholics.

Before the days of the great war, Pres. E. Y. Mullins, with prophetic vision wrote:

We are approaching the Baptist age of the world, because we are approaching the age of the triumph of democracy. Like a vine growing in the darkness of some deep cavern, and slowly stretching itself toward the dim light shining in through the distant mouth of the cavern, so has humanity slowly crept on toward freedom. The mighty hordes of the Asiatic and European world, weary and sad yet courageous and resolute, are hastening forward with unresting feet toward the gates of destiny. Toward those gates these hundreds of years the Baptists have been pointing, and today in the foremost files of time they lead the way. As humanity enters they will shout with the full knowledge that God in Christ has led all the way.... And the goal of human progress shall be realized in an eternal society wherein absolute democracy is joined to absolute monarchy, God the Father being the monarch, and his people a vast family of free children.

True political liberty is the child of religious liberty. It must look to freedom of the soul as a child does to its mother for birth, protection, and provision. Political anarchy is the usual result of a people seeking full liberty by ignoring or neglecting the support which religion brings to man’s moral nature. It is a long road to political liberty, but it is a road which has run parallel with religious liberty. It is interesting to note the Americanization of the world. There were few democracies when our Republic was born. Our victory over tyranny was an inspiration to oppressed peoples. The French followed shortly afterward.Wherever Napoleon went, he held aloft the banner of equality and liberty. He granted the latter under a form of government by which he became emperor. After almost a century, France gained both. Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena did not usher in a restoration of the older European order. National sovereignty and constitutional government were the constituent parts of a liberty the people would not be denied in almost all the countries of Europe. In Italy, Charles Albert, King of Savoy, Sardinia, and Piedmont, gave his people a constitutional form of government. Though opposed by the papal States and Austria, this movement grew until, under King Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi, all Italy was united and free. Denmark followed in 1849, Greece in 1866, and Spain the following year. The Christians of the Balkan Peninsula revolted from the Turks in 1875, and were recognized a power by the greater powers and were given a constitutional government. In 1910 Portugal banished royalty and welcomed democracy. Russia, in 1917, threw off the shackles of autocracy for those of anarchy. When she awakes from her delirium she will doubtless see the true light and follow it.

The Americanization of Asia is moving rapidly forward. In 1852 Commodore Perry—by a strange providence from Rhode Island—forced open the door into Japan. The shoguns, masters for centuries, lost their power. Then the Mikado for twenty years took their autocratic powers to himself but was compelled after that to give his people a liberal constitutional form of government. The Chinese nation, hoary with age, entered the list of democracies in 1911, becoming the United States of China. The Shah of Persia, after a broken promise which brought on a revolution, gave his people, in 1906, a constitutional form of government. The Young Turks in 1909, after compelling Abdul Hamid II to abdicate, placed Mohammed V on the throne as his successor. Prior to the Great War they had what is at least an approach to the newer constitutional ideals of the modern world.

The lands to the south of us have their struggle toward the same desired goal. The Republic of Mexico needs a religious and educational preparation which will largely solve, among that unassimilated conglomeration of Indians, negroes, and mestizos, the problem of stable government. Let the religious leaders ofMexico, who have tried for centuries with their religious autocratic systems, give way for a single generation to the evangelical churches with their democratic idealisms and the unchained Bible, and then revolutions and immorality will fade away, and the land, so desolated in recent years, will blossom like the rose.

When Napoleon defeated the monarchs of Europe and their system, he shook the confidence of the people of Central and South America in their absent monarchs across the seas. South American nations followed one by one into the class of democracies. Central American States also broke away from their European masters. These lands need the open Bible of the evangelical Christian churches more than our battleships and marines. When superstition is banished by the light which radiates from the Bible, then the republics to the south of us will vie with us in advancement and prosperity.

Absolute monarchy is doomed in Europe and throughout the world. The sword unsheathed by America must not rest in its scabbard until democracy is safe in the world and the world is made safe for democracy. Belgium outraged, France desecrated, Great Britain drained, Russia bleeding slowly to death, and all Europe a shambles, may find in the ideals of Roger Williams healing for their wounds and health for the coming years.

Due honor should be given to every colony builder of the New World. Great were their suffering and sacrifices.

All praise to others of the vanguard then,To Spain, to France, to Baltimore and Penn.To Jesuit, Quaker, Puritan, and Priest,Their toils be crowned, their honors be increased.Give praise to others early come or late,For love and labor on our ship of state.

All praise to others of the vanguard then,To Spain, to France, to Baltimore and Penn.To Jesuit, Quaker, Puritan, and Priest,Their toils be crowned, their honors be increased.

All praise to others of the vanguard then,

To Spain, to France, to Baltimore and Penn.

To Jesuit, Quaker, Puritan, and Priest,

Their toils be crowned, their honors be increased.

Give praise to others early come or late,For love and labor on our ship of state.

Give praise to others early come or late,

For love and labor on our ship of state.

By faith the Pilgrims left old England, and sojourned in Holland as in a strange country. By faith they trusted their all to God and the Mayflower. By faith they endured the hardships of that first winter and founded their colony in which they sought to honor God according to the truth as they saw it. All honor to the faith of our Pilgrim Fathers.

In hope the Puritans left their native land, seeking not a separation from the mother Church but rather purification of theEstablished Order. In hope they founded Salem and Boston and other towns about the Massachusetts Bay. In hope they laid strong the foundations which afterward led to the victories of Lexington and Bunker Hill. All honor to the Puritan builders of a great commonwealth, the New America.

Through charity Roger Williams fled into the depths of snowy forests and crossed frozen streams, to form among savage tribes a new colony where no man would be denied political privileges because of religious belief. Through charity he forgave those who exiled him and at the risk of his own life saved Puritan and Pilgrim from an impending Indian massacre. Through charity he shared his purchased possessions gratuitously with others. Through charity he formed the immortal compact binding men together “only in civil things.” Through charity he sacrificed his humble patrimony, his home at Salem, and the earnings of his lifetime to safeguard and protect the colony he had founded for the joys of others. Through charity he extended for the first time in our national history a loving welcome to men of all beliefs into the new fraternity of human hearts founded for human helpfulness.

Roger Williams possessed the faith of the Pilgrim and the hope of the Puritan. Faith and hope getteth, but charity giveth. Roger Williams possessed the charity of Christ. He followed in the footsteps of his Master along a pathway of pain. Like the Man of Galilee, in the olive orchard and vine-clad garden, and on the bleak skull-shaped hill without the walls of Jerusalem, his humble servant, the man of Providence, had his Gethsemane and Golgotha in the frozen forests and on the snow-clad hills under the wintry skies of New England.

Aye, call it holy ground,The soil where first they trod,They left unstained what there they found,Freedom to worship God.

Aye, call it holy ground,

The soil where first they trod,

They left unstained what there they found,

Freedom to worship God.

And now in these United States of America, there abideth the faith of the Pilgrim, the hope of the Puritan, and the charity of Roger Williams; but the greatest of these is charity.

Back to Index Next