Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth.
Writes against the royal patents.At Plymouth Williams spoke, as he had at Salem, without restraint from any motive of expediency or even of propriety. Separatist Plymouth, whose days of advance were over, was a little disturbed by his speech. In his own sweet, reckless way he sometimes sharply rebuked even the revered Bradford when he thought him at fault. And in the interest of the aborigines and of justice Williams laid before Governor Bradford a manuscript treatise which argued that the king had no right to give away, as he had assumed to do in his grants and charters, the lands of the Indians merely because he was a Christian and they heathen. That it was right to wrong a man because he was not orthodox in belief could find no place in the thoughts of one whose conscience was wholly incapable of sophistication. Bradford accepted candidly the rebukes of Williams and loved him for his "many precious parts."Bradford, 310.But as governor of a feeble colony he was disturbed by Williams's course. In spirituality, unselfish fearlessness, and a bold pushing of Separatist principles to their ultimate logical results, Roger Williams reminded the Pilgrims of the amiable pastor of the Separatist church in Amsterdam whose change step by step to "Anabaptism," the great bugbear of theology in that time, had been a tragedy and a scandal to the Separatists of Leyden.Knowles's Life of Williams, 53.Elder Brewster feared that Williams would run the same course. Williams wished to return to Salem, where he might still devote himself to the neighboring Indians, andassist Skelton, now declining in health. Brewster persuaded the Plymouth church to give him a letter of dismissal.Williams returns to Salem.The leading Pilgrims felt bound to send "some caution" to the Salem church regarding the extreme tendencies of Williams. On the other hand, some of the Plymouth people were so captivated by his teachings and his personal character that they removed with him. This following of an approved minister was common among Puritans; an acceptable preacher was of as much value to a town as good meadows, broad pastures, and pure water.
The town system.To understand the brief career of Williams at Salem and its catastrophe, we must recall the character of colonial life in Massachusetts at the time. There were already sixteen settlements or "towns" on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, with an indefinite stretch of gloomy wilderness for background, the dwelling place of countless savages and wild beasts. The population of all the settlements may have summed up five thousand people—enough to have made one prosperous village. The inhabitants of the various towns of the bay were from different parts of England; their dress and dialect were diverse, and their Puritanism was of various complexions. The town system, at first a reproduction on new soil of the township field communes that had subsisted in parts of England from ages beyond the fountain heads of tradition,gave some play to local peculiarities and prejudices. There is evidence that the central government relieved itself from strain by means of this rural borough system. The ancient town system in turn appears to have taken on a new youth; it was perhaps modified and developed by the local diversity of the people, and it lent to Massachusetts, at first, something of the elasticity of a federal government.Note 6.
Life in the Massachusetts settlements.This community of scattered communes was cut off from frequent intercourse with the world, for the sea was far wider and more to be feared in that day of small ships and imperfect navigation than it is now.1630 to 1640.The noise of the English controversies in which the settlers had once borne a part reached them at long intervals, like news from another planet. But most of the time these lonesome settlements had no interest greater than the petty news and gossip of little forest hamlets. The visitor who came afoot along Indian trails, or by water, paddling in a canoe, to Boston on lecture day, might bring some news of sickness, accident, or death. Sometimes the traveling story was exciting, as that wolves had slaughtered the cattle at a certain place, while yet cattle were few and precious. Or still more distressing intelligence came that the ruling elder of the church at Watertown had taken the High-church position that Roman churches were Christian churches, or that democratic views had been advanced by Eliot of Roxbury. A new and far-fetched prophetical explanationof a passage in the Book of Canticles, and a tale of boatmen wrecked in some wintry tempest, might divide the attention of the people. Stories of boats capsized, of boatmen cast on islands where there was neither shelter nor food, of boats driven far to sea and heard of no more, were staples of excitement in these half-aquatic towns; and if the inmates of a doomed boat had been particularly profane, these events were accounted edifying—divine judgments on the ungodly. When the governor wandered once and lost himself in the forest, passing the night in a deserted wigwam, there was a sensation of a half-public character. That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, and that the puny mouse had triumphed at last, was in one budget of traveling news that came to Boston. To this event an ominous significance was given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, maker of anagrams, solemn utterer of rhyming prophecies which were sometimes fulfilled, and general theological putterer. Wilson made the snake represent the devil, according to all sound precedents; the mouse was the feeble church in the wilderness, to which God would give the victory over Satan. Thus enhanced by an instructive interpretation from the prophet and seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its travels once more, and now with its hopeful exegesis on its back. The Massachusetts mouse was an auspicious creature; it is recorded by the governor, and it was no doubt told along the coast,that one got into a library and committed depredations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling every leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared a Greek Testament and a Psalter in the same covers.
In a petty state with a range of intellectual interests so narrow, the conflict between Williams and the General Court took place.
Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community.It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God—the God who led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers—the Dutch in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders, with their admixture of papists—they looked with condescension if not with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World.Note 7.The settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history; that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands of New England. The theocraticalgovernment was thought to be the one most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off image worship.
John Cotton, 1633.The apostle of theocracy who arrived soon after Williams's return to Salem was John Cotton, a Puritan leader in England, in whom devoutness was combined with extreme discretion, a dominant will with a diplomatic prudence and a temper never ruffled. Cotton's ingenious refinements made him a valuable apologist in an age of polemics, but they often served to becloud his vision of truth and right. He was prone to see himself as he posed, in the character of a protagonist of truth. He gave wise advice to the Massachusetts Puritans at their departure from England. When, a few years later, Laud's penetrating vigilance and relentless thoroughness made even Cotton's well-balanced course of mild non-conformity impossible, he fled from his parish of Boston, in Lincolnshire, to London, and escaped in 1633 with difficulty to the new Boston in New England. As John Cotton had been the shining candle of Puritanism in England, his arrival in America was hailed with joy, and from the time of his settlement in the little capital his was the hand that shaped ecclesiastical institutions in New England, and he did much also to mold the yet plastic state.Note 8.Though he usually avoided the appearance of personal antagonism,every formidable rival he had left Massachusetts early. Williams, Hooker, Davenport, and Hugh Peter all found homes beyond the bounds of the colony. There can not be two queen bees in one hive, nor can there well be more than one master mind in the ecclesiastical order of a petty theocratic state. It was the paradox of colonial religious organization that the Episcopal colonies had parishes almost independent of all supervision, while the New England Congregationalists were, from the arrival of Cotton, subject to the dominance of ministers who virtually attained to the authority of bishops.
Salem refractory.Salem, the oldest town of the commonwealth, was the most ready to pursue an independent course and it was attached to Williams, whose ability attracted new settlers and who maintained a position of independence toward Cotton and the authorities at Boston. To subdue the refractory Salem was no doubt one of the secondary purposes of the proceedings against Williams. There seems to have been no personal animosity toward Williams himself; his amiable character and his never-doubted sincerity were main obstacles to his punishment.
Collision inevitable.The return of Roger Williams to such a place as Salem was naturally a matter of alarm to the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts. Collision was not a matter of choice on either side.The catastrophe was like one that comes from the irresistible action of physical forces. In a colony planted at great cost to maintain one chosen form of worship and subordinating all the powers of government to this purpose, a preacher who asserted the necessity for a complete separation of religion and government in the interest of soul liberty had no place. His ideal was higher than the prevailing one, but that age could not possibly rise to it.
The book against the patent.Williams was yet only a private member of the church in Salem, but in the illness of the pastor he "exercised by way of prophecy"—that is, preached without holding office. An alarming report was soon in circulation that he had written a book against the king's patent, the foundation of the colonial authority. This treatise, we have said, was written in Plymouth for the benefit of Governor Bradford.Note 9.Like many of the manuscript books that have come down to us, it appears to have been a small quarto, and, if it resembled other books of the sort, it was neatly stitched and perhaps even bound by its author in the favorite pigskin of the time. Williams sent his book promptly to be examined. Some of the "most judicious ministers much condemned Mr. Williams's error and presumption," and an order was made that he "should be convented at the next court." In the charges no fault was found with the main thesis ofthe book, that the king could not claim and give away the lands of the Indians; but it was thought that there were disloyal reflections cast upon both James and Charles—at least those eager to condemn construed the obscure and "implicative phrases" of Williams in that sense—and these supposed reflections were the subject of the charges. Williams wrote a submissive letter, and offered his book, or any part of it, to be burned after the manner of that time. A month later, when the governor and council met, the whole aspect of the affair had changed. Cotton and Wilson, the teacher and the pastor of the Boston church, certified, after examination of Williams's quarto, that "they found the matters not so evil as at first they seemed." It was decided to let Williams off easily. There are some things unexplained about the affair; the eagerness of the "judicious ministers" and court to condemn without due examination, the failure even to specify the objectionable passages at last, and the unwonted docility of Williams—all leave one to infer that there was more in this transaction than appears. Laud and his associates were moving to have the Massachusetts charter vacated, and it may have seemed imprudent for the magistrates to found their authority on a base so liable to disappear. If the charter had been successfully called in, Williams's ground of the sufficiency of the Indian title to lands might have proved useful as a last resort. Williams asserted, long afterward, that before his troubles began he had drafted a letteraddressed to the king, "not without the approbation of some of the chiefs of New England," whose consciences were also "tender on this point before God."Reply to Cotton, 276, 277.This letter humbly acknowledged "the evil of that part of the patent which relates" to the gift of lands. Had the letter been sent to its destination it would have cut a curious figure among the worldly-minded state papers of the time.
An abstract principle.It is probable that most of the land of the colony had been secured from the natives by purchase or by treaty of some sort; at least the Indians were content, and the little quarto had at that time no practical bearing whatever, but that did not matter to Williams. The more abstract a question of right and wrong, the more he relished a discussion of it. It was of a piece with his exquisite Separatism, a mere standing up in the face of heaven and earth for an abstract principle. His purpose was not to right a specific and concrete wrong, for there had been none, but to assert as a broad principle of everlasting application that a Christian king may not dispose of the land owned by heathens merely because of his Christianity. Williams was not a judge or a lawgiver; he was a poet in morals, enamored of perfection, and keeping his conscience purer than Galahad's.
The alarm.It was in the winter of 1633-'34 that the book about the patent was called in question. Skelton, pastor of Salem, died in the following August,and the Salem people, in spite of an injunction from the magistrates, made Williams their teacher in his stead.1634.The country was now full of alarm at news from England that the charter was to be revoked, that a general governor of New England was to be appointed, and that a force was to be sent to support his authority. Laud was put at the head of a commission for the government of the colonies in April, 1634. There could be no doubt of the meaning of this measure. For more than a year the alarm in Massachusetts continued. The ministers were consulted regarding the lawfulness of resistance to force. A platform was constructed on the northeast side of Castle Island, and a fortified house was proposed to defend the platform. The trainbands were drilled, muskets, "bandeleroes" or cartridge belts, and rests were distributed to the several towns, and pikemen were required to learn to use the cumbrous musket of the time. Puritans in England, angry that Laud, the new archbishop and old persecutor, should stretch a long arm to America, sent powder and cannon to their co-religionists, the object of whose military vigilance could easily be covered by dangers from the savages, from the French, or from the Spaniards.
Debates not appeased.But these assiduous preparations, under the supervision of a military commission which had "power of life and limb," did not abate in the least the discussion of questions of doctrine and casuistry. Refinements of theology were quite as realand substantial to the Puritan mind as trainbands and fortifications. Sound doctrine and a scrupulous observance of the "ordinances" conciliated God; they were indeed more important elements of public safety than drakes and demi-culverins.
Reform in dress.The General Court of September, 1634, undertook to provide for the public safety in both respects.Mass. Records, 3d September, 1634.Along with regulations and provisions of a military nature, it set out to remove those flagrant sins that had provoked the divine wrath. The wearing of silver, gold, and rich laces, girdles, and hatbands was forbidden; slashed clothes were also abolished, "other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back"; ruffs and beaver hats, which last were apparently a mark of dudishness, were not to be allowed. Long hair and other fashions "prejudicial to the general good" were done away with in this hour of penitence.Compare Ward's Simple Cobbler,passim.Men and women might wear out the clothes they had, except their "immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparel, immoderate great rayles, long wings," which were to go at once without reprieve or ceremony. The use of tobacco, socially and in public, or before strangers was made an offense. If taken secretly or medicinally, the Court did not take cognizance of it.
The fast-day sermon.Seeing that the millinery sins recounted in this act had cried to Heaven, and that, beside the danger from England, there was the desire of Hooker'sparty to remove to the Connecticut, and a dissension concerning the power of the Upper House that threatened trouble, the Court appointed the 18th of September a solemn fast-day, hoping by repentance, prayer, and the penance of hunger to avert the manifold disasters that threatened them.1634.Roger Williams was sure to speak like a prophet on such an occasion. He did not stop at slashed garments, great sleeves, and headdresses with long wings; he preached on eleven "public sins" that had provoked divine wrath. We have no catalogue left us. The list may have included some of those amusing scruples that he held in common with other Puritans, or some of those equally trivial personal scruples that Williams cherished so fondly. But no sermon of his on public sins could fail to contain a declaration of his far-reaching and cherished principle of religious freedom, including perhaps a round denunciation of the petty inquisition into private opinion which had been set up in Massachusetts. The Sabbath law, the law obliging men to pay a tax to support religious worship, the requirement that all should attend religious worship under penalty, and the enforcement of a religious oath on irreligious and perhaps unwilling residents, the assumption of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of a church under the advice of the ministers, were points of Massachusetts law and administration that he denounced at various times; and some of them, if not all, were no doubt put in pillory inthis fast-day sermon in the early autumn of 1634. Judged by modern standards, the sermon may have had absurdities enough, but it was no doubt a long way in advance of the General Court's mewling about lace, and slashes, and long hair, and other customs "prejudicial to the general good." To this sermon, whatever it was, Williams afterward attributed the beginning of the troubles that led to his banishment.
Williams dealt with ecclesiastically.Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governorship by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher" of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, entitled as such to be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's "violentcourse did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule.Note 10.Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.
The governor's verse.It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly against the Salem heretic was thus foiled by Cotton's prudent and intricate orderliness in procedure that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is happily the only example of his verse that has survived:
Eliot's New England Biography, 156, 157.
Let men of God in courts and churches watchO'er such as do a toleration hatch,Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatriceTo poison all with heresy and vice.If men be left and otherwise combine,My epitaph's I die no libertine.
The most substantial grievance of the rulers against Williams was his opposition to "the oath." In order to make sure of the loyalty of the residents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity to be taken by residents had been promulgated. Practical men are wont to put aside minor scruples in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew-bread when he is famishing: but Williams would rather starve than mumble a crumb of it. He did not believe in enforced oaths; they obliged the wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded the soul's freedom. Cotton says that Williams's scruples excited such an opposition to the oath that the magistrates were not able to enforce it.Note 11.He thus unwittingly throws a strong light on the weakness of the age, and extenuates the conduct of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The age was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this side was the product of his time. In such an age a scruple-maker of ability and originality like Williams might be a source of danger.
Scruples small and great.During the year following Williams was several times "convented" before the Court. He was charged with having broken his promise not to speak about the patent, with opposing the residents' oath, with maintaining certain scruples in opposition to the customs of the times, as that a man should not return thanks after a meal, or call on an unregenerate child to give thanks for hisfood. These were not more trivial certainly than half a hundred scruples then prevalent, but they chanced to be unfashionable—a damning fault in a scruple. The sense of proportion was feeble in religionists of that day, and neither Williams nor his opponents understood the comparative magnitude of his greater contentions, and the triviality of those petty scruples about which, like the whole Puritan world, he was very busy. Religious freedom and the obligation of grace after meat could then be put into the same category. As years went by, although the mind of Williams was never disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to see clearly what was the real battle of his life. No better fortune can befall a great spirit than such a clarification of vision. The extended works of Williams's later life are written mainly to overthrow the "bloody tenent of persecution." It was this championship of soul liberty as the weightiest matter of the law that lifted him above all others who paid tithes of their little garden herbs.
Williams inflexible.Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of the Roman churches.Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 81.Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle, advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced.Mass. Rec., i, 135, 136.Stoughton, who had denied that the "assistants" of a corporation were scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he retracted.Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last. The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leadership, protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem.Mass. Rec., i, 156, 157. Winthrop's Journal, i, 194.He was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the "rockie strength" of his opinions in spite of penalties and majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the commonwealth.
Williams's trial.Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, incorrigible offender. Eliot, Stoughton, and Endecott, and even Williams's fellow-elder, Sharpe, and the whole church at Salem, might be argued into conformity by the sharp dialectics of the clergy, or bullied out of their convictions by the sharper logic of the magistrates, but Roger Williams could not be overborne. Individualist in his very nature, hisself-reliant spirit was able to face isolation or excommunication. The great Hooker was set to dispute with him. Hooker's refined arguments were drawn out by inferences linked to inferences. He proved to the satisfaction of everybody but the culprit that it was not lawful for Williams, with his opinions, to set food before his unregenerate child, since he did not allow an irreligious child to go through the form of giving thanks. But the wire-drawn logic of Hooker, though Williams could not always answer it, had no more influence with him than the ingenious sophistications of the pious Cotton; Williams constantly fell back upon the "rockie strength" of his principles. On the 9th of October, 1635, he was sentenced to banishment. After the manner of that curious age, his banishment was based on charges of great importance mixed with charges utterly trivial. His denial of the authority of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of the churches and the belief of individuals is, however, made one of the cardinal offenses in all the trustworthy accounts given at the time.Note 12.With this were joined in the proceedings, but not in the sentence, such things as the denial of the propriety of grace after meat. All the elders but one advised his banishment.
Williams banished.The magistrates, though deeply "incensed" against him, probably felt at the last some reluctance to banish such a man. Six weeks were accorded him in which to leave.Note 13.Winthrop, who was Williams's friend, and who seems to have beenloath to consent to his banishment, wrote to him to "steer his course for Narragansett Bay," where there was territory beyond the bounds of Massachusetts and Plymouth.Note 14.The forest journeys or boat voyages to Boston and back, the bitter controversies there, and the uproar of indignation which was produced in Salem by the news of the verdict, the desertion of Williams by Endecott, convinced by force, and by Sharpe, the ruling elder, who had been also dealt with, the natural yielding of the Salem church after a while to the pressure from the General Court, and to the desire of the townsmen to secure the lands at Marble Neck, put a strain on Williams which, added to his necessary toil in the field, broke his health and he fell ill. The General Court probably also felt the recoil of its act. When six weeks had expired consent was given that Williams should remain during the winter provided he would refrain from preaching. But Williams was in Salem, and in Salem he was the center of interest—just now he was the center of explosion. It was impossible for the great Separatist to be silent. A few faithful friends, come-outers like himself, clave to him and repudiated as he did communion with the church at Salem, which could condone the offenses of the magistrates for the sake of "these children's toys of land, meadows, cattle, and government."Note 15.These fellow-Separatists, some of whom perhaps had removed from Plymouth out of love for this unworldly saint, loved him none the less for his courage and his sorrows.They frequented his house on Sunday as he convalesced. Indeed, the attachment to him was so great that the "ordinances" which had been appointed by the magistrates and enforced on Salem as the price of the common land on Marble Neck, were neglected and almost deserted.Note 16.Williams could not refrain from speech with this concourse of visitors, and at length word came to Boston that more than twenty persons had definitely adhered to the opinions of their former teacher, unconvinced by the argument of the rod of justice applied to Endecott and Sharpe, or by the valuable land on Marble Neck. These disciples proposed to remove in the spring with Williams to the shores of Narragansett Bay. This might meet the approval of the sagacious and kindly Winthrop, who had directed Williams's attention to that promising place, and who foresaw perhaps the usefulness of such a man in the dangerous Indian crisis now threatening the colony. But to devotees of uniformity, the prospect of a community on the very border of the land of the saints tolerating all sorts of opinionists was insufferable. When once the civil government weights itself with spiritual considerations, its whole equilibrium is disturbed. Liberty and justice seem insignificant by the side of the immensities.Savage's Winthrop, i, 209, 210.The magistrates, or a part of them, were alarmed at the prospect of a settlement of the followers of Williams at Narragansett Bay, "whence the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people being, many of them,much taken with an apprehension of his godliness." It was therefore agreed to send him to England on a ship soon to sail.
Escape to the Indians.The hardships of such a voyage in midwinter in his state of health might prove fatal, and his arrival in England would almost certainly deliver him into the hands of Laud. But what is justice or mercy when the welfare of churches and the rescue of imperiled souls is to be considered? A warrant was dispatched ordering him to Boston within a certain time. Probably knowing what was in store for him, he protested that it would be dangerous for him, in view of his health, to make the journey, and some of the Salem people went to Boston in his behalf, and, as was natural in the circumstances, made exaggerated representations regarding his physical condition. But the magistrates had other information. They sent the valiant and notorious Captain Underhill, in whom were mingled about equally devoutness, military courage, and incorrigible lewdness, to bring Williams by sea in a shallop. Williams was probably informed of their purpose, for, while Underhill in his little craft was beating up to Salem in wintry seas on an errand so congenial, expecting perhaps to come upon his quarry unawares, Williams was fleeing from one hamlet of bark wigwams to another. Here among the barbarians he was sure of faithful friends and secure concealment. Underhill foundon his arrival that the culprit had disappeared three days before he got there, and nobody in Salem, that could, would tell whither the fugitive had gone.
Williams founds Providence.Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure of speech, "steering his course" "in winter snow" toward Narragansett Bay. "I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," he says, in his vivid and hyperbolic fashion of speech, "not knowing what bed or bread did mean." He began one settlement on the eastern bank of the Seekonk River after getting land from the Indians, but his old enemies the royal patents now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of Plymouth, a kind-hearted, politic man, the one born diplomatist of New England, warned him that he was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked him to remove to the other side of the water, because they "were loath to displease the Bay." It was not enough to drive a heretic from the bounds of Massachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the time would have expelled him from the continent had its arm been long enough. Williams had already begun to build and to plant, but he removed once more to the place which he named Providence. He planted the germinal settlement of the first state in the world that founded religious liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to the law no cognizance whatever of religious beliefs or conduct where the "civil peace" was not endangered.
The early settlements on Narragansett Bay.
Williams's banishment an act of persecution.Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have done what they could to obscure the facts of the trial and banishment of Williams. It has been argued by more than one writer that it was not a case of religious persecution at all, but the exclusion of a man dangerous to the state. Cotton, with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that Williams was "enlarged" rather than banished. The case has even been pettifogged in our own time by the assertion that the banishment was only the action of a commercial company excluding an uncongenial person from its territory. But with what swift indignation would the Massachusetts rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes have repudiated a plea which denied their magistracy! They put so strong a pressure on Stoughton, who said that the assistants were not magistrates, that he made haste to renounce his pride of authorship and to deliver his booklet to be officially burned, nor did even this prevent his punishment. The rulers of "the Bay" were generally frank advocates of religious intolerance; they regarded toleration as a door set open for the devil to enter. Not only did they punish for unorthodox expressions; they even assumed to inquire into private beliefs.Note 17.Williams was only one of scores bidden to depart on account of opinion.
Intolerance as a virtue.The real and sufficient extenuation for the conduct of the Massachusetts leaders is found in thecharacter and standards of the age. A few obscure and contemned sectaries—Brownists, Anabaptists, and despised Familists—in Holland and England had spoken more or less clearly in favor of religious liberty before the rise of Roger Williams, but nobody of weight or respectable standing in the whole world had befriended it.Note 18.All the great authorities in church and state, Catholic and Protestant, prelatical and Puritan, agreed in their detestation of it. Even Robinson, the moderate pastor of the Leyden Pilgrims, ventured to hold only to the "toleration of tolerable opinions." This was the toleration found at Amsterdam and in some other parts of the Low Countries. Even this religious sufferance which did not amount to liberty was sufficiently despicable in the eyes of that intolerant age to bring upon the Dutch the contempt of Christendom. It was a very qualified and limited toleration, and one from which Catholics and Arminians were excluded. It seems to have been that practical amelioration of law which is produced more effectually by commerce than by learning or religion.Note 19.Outside of some parts of the Low Countries, and oddly enough of the Turkish Empire, all the world worth counting decried toleration as a great crime. It would have been wonderful indeed if Massachusetts had been superior to the age. "I dare aver," says Nathaniel Ward, the New England lawyer-minister, "that God doth no where in his word tolerate Christian States to give tolerations to such adversaries of his Truth, ifthey have power in their hands to suppress them."Simple Cobbler of Agawam, pp. 3 and 6.To set up toleration was "to build a sconce against the walls of heaven to batter God out of his chair," in Ward's opinion.
The casuistry of Cotton.This doctrine of intolerance was sanctioned by many refinements of logic, such as Cotton's delicious sophistry that if a man refused to be convinced of the truth, he was sinning against conscience, and therefore it was not against the liberty of conscience to coerce him.Note 20.Cotton's moral intuitions were fairly suffocated by logic. He declared that men should be compelled to attend religious service, because it was "better to be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give God part of his due, the outward man, but the profane person giveth God neither outward nor inward man."Hutchinson Papers, 496.To reason thus is to put subtlety into thecathedraof common sense, to bewilder vision by legerdemain. Notwithstanding his natural gift for devoutness and his almost immodest godliness, Cotton was incapable of high sincerity. He would not specifically advise Williams's banishment, but having labored with him round a corner according to his most approved ecclesiastical formula, he said, "We have no more to say in his behalf, but must sit down"; by which expression of passivity he gave the signal to the "secular arm" to do its worst, while he washed his hands in innocent self-complacency. When one scrupulous magistrateconsulted him as to his obligation in Williams's case, Cotton answered his hesitation by saying, "You know they are so much incensed against his course that it is not your voice nor the voice of two or three more that can suspend the sentence."Note 21.By such shifty phrases he shirked responsibility for the results of his own teaching. Of the temper that stands alone for the right, Nature had given him not a jot. Williams may be a little too severe, but he has some truth when he describes Cotton on this occasion as "swimming with the stream of outward credit and profit," though nothing was further from Cotton's conscious purpose than such worldliness. Cotton's intolerance was not like that of Dudley and Endecott, the offspring of an austere temper; it was rather the outgrowth of his logic and his reverence for authority.Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience.He sheltered himself behind the examples of Elizabeth and James I, and took refuge in the shadow of Calvin, whose burning of Servetus he cites as an example, without any recoil of heart or conscience. But the consideration of the character of the age forbids us to condemn the conscientious men who put Williams out of the Massachusetts theocracy as they would have driven the devil out of the garden of Eden.Character of Puritanism.When, however, it comes to judging the age itself, and especially to judging the Puritanism of the age, these false and harsh ideals are its sufficient condemnation. Its government and its very religion were barbarous; its Bible, except for mystical and ecclesiastical uses, might as well haveclosed with the story of the Hebrew judges and the imprecatory Psalms. The Apocalypse of John, grotesquely interpreted, was the one book of the New Testament that received hearty consideration, aside from those other New Testament passages supposed to relate to a divinely appointed ecclesiasticism. The humane pity of Jesus was unknown not only to the laws, but to the sermons of the time.Note 22.About the time of Williams's banishment the lenity of John Winthrop was solemnly rebuked by some of the clergy and rulers as a lax imperiling of the safety of the gospel; and Winthrop, overborne by authority, confessed, explained, apologized, and promised amendment.Savage's Winthrop, i, 211-214.The Puritans substituted an unformulated belief in the infallibility of "godly" elders acting with the magistrates for the ancient doctrine of an infallible church.
Character of Williams. His scruples.In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never was a noble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial.New England Firebrand Quenched, 246.Cotton aptly dubbed him "a haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. Indating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month, lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as "52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting words, or with the Latin "ut vulgo." What quarrel the tender conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness and hearty friendship. But his conscience does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellowship with the man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend.Williams to Winthrop, 1637, Narr. Club, vi.Once at least he guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your worship's faithful and affectionate in allcivilbonds." It would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if these minute restrictions had been a source of annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist.Note 23.
Williams becomes a Seeker.Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was themainspring of the High-church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and still more the goal of the Separatist. One party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of institutions that had grown up in the ages and in getting back to the primitive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possibilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism; he had now swung round to where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker.Note 24.
The Seekers.Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they weresanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time. The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a resting place for many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism until he had passed out on the other side into the region of devout and contented uncertainty.
Moral elevation of WilliamsIn all this Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and that not because of intellectual superiority—for he had no large philosophical views—but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions about the character of the savages—he styles them "wolves endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane treatment of them.All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not make him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England."
Superior to the age.Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-shining inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams. In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.
His prophetic character.This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever clearer as the ages go on.