INTRODUCTION
The new Life of Roger Williams is certain to receive a cordial welcome and a wide reading. It has been eight years sinceDr.Edmund J. Carpenter published his “Roger Williams, a Study of the Life, Times and Character of a Political Pioneer,” and twenty-three years since the admirable work by Oscar S. Straus, entitled “Roger Williams, the Pioneer of Religious Liberty,” appeared. In the meantime Irving B. Richman has given to the public his able volumes on “Rhode Island, its Making and its Meaning,” which naturally and inevitably portrayed the character and service of its great founder. Rhode Island was but the incarnation of the views and principles of Roger Williams.
In view of these recent biographies, added to several which had been written previously and the large place which Roger Williams fills in all publications on New England history, it may be asked, “Is there a demand fora new Life?” It may be answered emphatically, “Yes, if it is written in the attractive and popular style in which Mrs. Hall has done her work.” She has made herself familiar with the facts of Roger Williams’ life so far as known, with the spirit of the Puritan age and the causes which led to his banishment, with his advanced views of religious liberty, his courageous efforts to defend them and his heroic self-denials and sufferings to incorporate them in human government, with the reasons which justify the title now universally given to him as “the pioneer and apostle of soul liberty,” with the evidences of his humane and forgiving spirit toward those who had persecuted him and his wonderful success in preserving them more than once from slaughter by hostile Indians, with his deep and abiding interest in the native tribes and his labors for their moral and spiritual elevation, with his success in acquiring their barbarous language, winning their confidence and turning many of them from their idolatry and superstitions to the knowledge of the true God and the acceptance of Christian truth, whichlabors place him side by side with John Eliot, the Puritan apostle to the Indians. With all these things Mrs. Hall has made herself familiar, and also with his noble service, often rendered, as a wise statesman and recognized peacemaker among the turbulent elements in his little colony as well as between the natives and the Puritan settlers, with his recognition by the British Parliament as a scholar of exceptional ability and an eminent philanthropist, when they granted his request for a charter for his imperiled venture, and also with his intimate acquaintance with some of the distinguished leaders of the England of his day, viz., Cromwell, Milton and Sir Henry Vane, Jr., and she has told the wonderful story in a manner that will charm and instruct readers, both old and young.
The life of Roger Williams was surrounded with not a little of romance—the uncertainty of the date and place of his birth, his discovery and patronage by the eminent jurist, Sir Edward Coke, his unfortunate first-love experience, his migration to the wilderness of the new world, hisexpulsion by his companions from their primitive society, who found him a disturbing element by reason of his advanced political opinions, his retention of the esteem and friendship of some of the ablest men who drove him out because of his “pestilential doctrines,” as, for instance, the Winthrops, father and son, with whom he kept up an affectionate correspondence as long as he lived (more than one hundred of his letters to them have been preserved), and the remarkable success of his “lively experiment,” which has given to him an honored and conspicuous name with all modern historians and has exerted an influence upon human government which is rapidly encircling the globe. Roger Williams was charged by his Puritan neighbors with having “a windmill in his head.” Not only Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but the whole nation, from ocean to ocean, is now enjoying the priceless grist which that despised windmill ground out. It looks as if Roger Williams was fast coming into his own. Prof. Romeo Elton said in his “Life of Roger Williams,” published sixty-threeyears ago, “His property, his time and his talents were devoted to the promotion of the temporal and spiritual welfare of mankind, and in conducting to a glorious issue the struggle to unloose the bonds of the captive daughter of Zion.” Charles Francis Adams, in his “Massachusetts, its Historians and its History,” frankly declares, “Massachusetts, in the person of her ministers and magistrates, missed a great destiny by rejecting Roger Williams.”
We of to-day undoubtedly look upon the Puritans with more charity and a greater appreciation of their spirit and excellences than did those of a former generation. We recognize their great virtues as well as their glaring faults. They were men of sterling character, of deep religious convictions, of willingness to make painful sacrifices for the sake of principle, of great reverence for the Bible and the institutions of religion, of purity of life in the home and in their social relations. They believed that religion was the supreme thing and that the commandments of God were of binding obligation upon all intelligent moral beings. Theymay have been too rigid in their interpretations and too severe in their application of religion to life and conduct, as, for example, in the observance of the Sabbath. But in our day of extreme and dangerous neglect men are saying, “There are some things that are worse than a Puritan Sabbath.” It might be well for modern life if we, the descendants of the Puritans, had inherited more of their virtues.
Of course in the matter of the separation of church and state they were still in the bonds of ignorance. Though they had broken away from the persecuting hand of the mother land and “the mother church,” as they loved to call it, they had not broken away from the belief which was the source and instigator of the persecuting spirit. As Prof. John Winthrop Platner has said recently in his “King’s Chapel Lecture” on the Congregationalists, “The connection between church and state was also close, in spite of their theoretical separation, so close in fact that the government of Massachusetts Bay has often been described as a theocracy.... They believed that no human governmentcould be firmly established, unless based upon the divine.... The mixture of law and religion of course gave rise to difficulties, and aroused criticism. It was the persistent exercise of jurisdiction over offenses “against the first table of the law” (i.e., against the first four commandments of the decalogue) that provoked the open hostility of Roger Williams against the authorities, and caused him to protest that the things of God and the things of Cæsar should not be confounded, a protest which brought him into trouble.”
The Puritans had hardly reached the dawn of the glorious day which was to be distinguished by absolute religious liberty. Roger Williams was enveloped in its full noonday splendor. Hon. James Bryce denominates him “an orthodox Puritan.” True, if he means an intense, logically consistent, fully ripened, radical Puritan, a Pilgrim of the Pilgrims. In the memorable words of Judge Storey, “In the code of laws established by Williams and his companions we read for the first time, since Christianity ascended the throne of theCæsars, the declaration that the conscience should be free, and that men should not be punished for worshiping God in the way they were persuaded He requires.” In similar language Professor Masson declares that Roger Williams organized “a community on the unheard-of principles of absolute religious liberty combined with perfect civil democracy.” Such is the unanimous testimony of historians as to the character and service of the founder of Rhode Island.Mr.Oscar Straus expresses the hope “that the time is not far distant when the civilized people in the remotest corners of the earth will recognize the truth and power of the principles which throw around the name of Roger Williams a halo of imperishable glory and fame.” May this new and popular biography, charming in style, appreciative in spirit and in harmony with the generally accepted facts of history, hasten the realization of this sublime hope.
Henry M. King,Pastor Emeritus of the First Baptist Church(The Roger Williams Church).Providence, R. I.