“I venerate the man whose heart is warm,Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life,Coincident, exhibit lucid proofThat he is honest in the sacred cause.”Cowper’sTask.
“I venerate the man whose heart is warm,Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life,Coincident, exhibit lucid proofThat he is honest in the sacred cause.”Cowper’sTask.
“I venerate the man whose heart is warm,
Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life,
Coincident, exhibit lucid proof
That he is honest in the sacred cause.”
Cowper’sTask.
The Pilgrim Fathers were enamoured of the Mosaic code. They esteemed it to be a diamond without a flaw. Their constant, persistent effort was to naturalize the Jewish ritual in New England. For this their statesmen planned and their divines dogmatized. They did not remember that the judicial government which fitted the world in its infancy had been outgrown, and now sat awkwardly upon Christendom twenty-one years of age. They did not remember that Christ had “rung out” the old dispensation and “rung in” a grander and broader one.
Of course, in standing under the Mosaic code they were perfectly sincere; and to their sincerity they wedded a Titanic earnestness. They regarded toleration as a snare and a curse. It was either the badge of indifference or the corslet of Atheism; therefore a vice entitled to no terms. The advocates of toleration in the seventeenth century may be counted on the fingers of one’s two hands. The most advanced thinkers of that epoch scarcelyventured, even in their most generous moments, to hint at a toleration of all creeds—each man responsible alone to God. The Romanist denied it amid the crackling flames of hisauto da fé, and held with the Sorbonne and with Bossuét, that the stake is bound to extirpate heresy.[814]The Protestant urged exceptions when he asked for toleration; and, with Cartwright, forsook those who came under his ban, “that they might not corrupt and infect others.”[815]
Tindale appealed not to the Pope, or to councils, or to the king, but to the Bible. So did Latimer; so did the Ridleys; so did Cranmer; so did Bradford: all of whom were blessed martyrs: yet none of these believed in full toleration; they had not yet reached it. They accepted what was behind them; they had a shadowy conception of what was in advance; but they feared, and were tolerant only up to their own position, while they cried “halt!” to a farther progress.
This European wave of sentiment swept in strong eddies to America; and in New England Cotton wrote: “It was toleration that made the world anti-Christian; and the church never took harm by the punishment of heretics.”[816]The cobbler of Agawam[817]responded: “Yes: to authorize an untruthby a toleration of state, is to build a sconce against the walls of heaven, to batter God out of his chair.”[818]
Therefore, the Pilgrim Fathers, backed by the public opinion of Christendom, tabooed toleration, and gave it no place under the theocracy. When Roger Williams landed with his wife at Boston, in 1631, this was the sentiment and so stood the law.
He was a Welchman—for he had been cradled in the crags of Carmarthen—some thirty years of age, ripe for great acts, and though sometime a minister of the English church, he had thrown up his living because he could not, in Milton’s phrase, “subscribe him slave,” by conforming to Laud’s idea.[819]
He had heard of America as a land of splendid possibilities—as the Holy Land of a grander crusade than that which had been launched to clutch the East from beneath the Saracenic scimetars; for this meant not empty sentimentality, it was an effort to win the wilderness for God. In that essay he longed to share; and his quick-flowing blood, his bold energy, and what Winthrop called his “godly fervor,” united to decide him to quit England, cramped in forms and chained in wrongs, for the young, elastic, unbounded freedom of the west of the Atlantic.
Roger Williams was an earnest seeker aftertruth. Like Robinson, he smiled at the idea that the acme of knowledge had been reached. He knew, moreover, that his goal was to be run for “not without toil and heat.” He was romantically conscientious; but he held to his opinions with grim determination, while the slowly-ripening principles of the English revolution of 1640 had already flowered in his brain. Now, in New England, he longed to set his ideas on two feet, and bid them run across the continent.
Like all positive characters, the young Welchman speedily attracted attention and made himself felt. His clear, ringing heel had scarce sounded in Boston streets ere he was cordoned by friends and surrounded by foes.[820]His opinions were novel; some of them have been grafted into the fundamental law of our Republic, and are now justly considered the palladium of religious peace; others are still unsettled and partly unaccepted, being held by certain sects, and rejected by several as thedisjecta membraof divinity; but to the Pilgrims they were alike odious and revolutionary.
But the principle upon which hangs his immortality of fame is that of complete toleration. “He was a Puritan, and a fugitive from English persecution,” remarks Bancroft, “but his wrongs had not clouded his accurate understanding. In the capacious recesses of his mind he had revolved the nature of intolerance, and he, and he alone, had arrived at the grand principle which is its sole effectualremedy. He announced his discovery under the simple proposition of the sanctity of conscience. The civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control opinion; should punish guilt, but never violate the freedom of the soul. The doctrine contained within itself an entire reformation of theological jurisprudence; it would blot from the statute-book the felony of non-conformity; would quench the fires that persecution had so long kept burning; would repeal every law compelling attendance on public worship; would abolish tithes and all forced contributions to the maintenance of religion; would give an equal protection to every form of religious faith; and never suffer the authority of civil government to be enlisted against the mosque of the Mussulman, or the altar of the fire-worshipper; the Jewish synagogue, or the Roman cathedral. It is wonderful with what distinctness Roger Williams deduced these inferences from his central tenet, the consistency with which, like Pascal and Edwards, those bold and profound reasoners on other subjects, he accepted every fair inference from his doctrine, and the circumspection with which he repelled every unjust imputation. In the unwavering assertion of these views he never changed his position; the sanctity of conscience was the great tenet, which, with all its consequences, he defended as he first trod the shores of New England; and in his extreme old age it was the last pulsation of his heart. But it placed the young emigrant in direct opposition to the wholesystem on which Massachusetts was founded; and forbearing and forgiving as was his temper, prompt as he was to concede every thing which honesty permitted, he always asserted his belief, however unpalatable it might be, with temperate firmness and an unbending benevolence.”[821]And just here, it is only fair to add, that his opponents, on their part, usually applied their principles without personal animosity. Between Williams and his great antagonist, Cotton, there was always, in their most heated moods, a substratum of cordial respect, while Winthrop, though consenting to the banishment of the pioneer American reformer, continued his fast friend through all.[822]
This principle of toleration, togetherwith several otherobnoxious tenets, all of which Williams avowed with frank courage, soon brought him under the frown of the colonial authorities—a frown which deepened when he refused to unite with the church at Boston “because its members would not make public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the church of England before their emigration.”[823]
This declaration—and the same thing may be said of several of his tenets—looks narrow and bigoted in our eyes; but Roger Williams had an undoubted right to cherish his own views under the very principles which he first of all men in America proclaimed,that “the public or the magistrate may decide what is due from man to man, but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they are out of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear, that if the magistrate has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs to-day and another to-morrow; as has been done in England by different kings and queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman church; so that belief would become a heap of confusion.”[824]
Be this as it may, the Pilgrims came to regard Roger Williams as a dangerous heresiarch; as “unsettled in judgment;”[825]as carrying “a windmill in his head.”[826]Indeed, so strong was this feeling that many years afterwards Cotton Mather headed his account of Williams’ advent, in the “Magnalia,” with this Latin: “Hic se aperit Diabolus”—Here the devil shows himself.[827]
Under these circumstances, we may easily imagine the consternation which reigned in Boston, when, in April, 1631, it was rumored that Roger Williams was about to be installed in the vacant place of Francis Higginson at Salem as assistant to Mr. Skelton.[828]The court was convened; and a letter was at once indited to John Endicott, “one of the chief promoters of the settlement,” in which, says Winthrop, the judges “marvelled that he should countenance such a choice without advising withthe Council; and withal desiring him to use his influence that the Salem church should forbear till all could confer about it.”[829]
In that day good ministers were not common in New England; and, moreover, the Salem churchmen liked Williams; so, without heeding the remonstrance of the authorities, they proceeded to settle the teacher of their choice. He at once began to preach; but with the advance of summer the temper of the government grew hot with the season, and finally he decided to bid Salem farewell and take refuge at Plymouth.[830]This he did, being soon after elected assistant to Ralph Smith.[831]At Plymouth as at Salem, he made many friends, and Bradford bears witness that he was “a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts.”[832]But his “strange opinions” were not fully approved; and consequently, when, after the death of Mr. Skelton, in 1633, the Salem church urged their truant pastor to return to them, Williams acceded. He was dismissed, as Brewster counselled, from the Plymouth church, but was followed back to Salem by a body-guard of devoted admirers, “who would have no other preacher.”[833]
It was during his sojourn at Plymouth that Roger Williams began to cement that famous friendship with the Indians which was one day to standhim in such good stead.[834]“My soul’s desire,” he said, “was to do the natives good.”[835]And later, when
“DeclinedInto the vale of years,”
“DeclinedInto the vale of years,”
“Declined
Into the vale of years,”
he wrote again: “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit, to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes, to gain their tongue.”[836]In this way he became acquainted with Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, and with Canonicus and Miantonomoh, the sachems of the Narragansetts, among whom, in after-years, he sought and found a home.
On his return to Salem his struggle with the government recommenced. While at Plymouth he had written a pamphlet against the validity of the colonial charter, and submitted it to Bradford.[837]Now he published it. He said: “Why lay such stress upon your patent from King James? ’Tis but idle parchment: James has no more right to give away or sell Massasoit’s lands, and cut and carve his country, than Massasoit has to sell James’ kingdom or to send his Indians to colonize Warwickshire.”[838]
Since the Pilgrims had legalized their title to the landin foro conscientiæ, by actual purchase from the aborigines,[839]it is somewhat difficult to conceivewhy Williams, already staggering under a load of odium, should have added to the pack by a declaration entirely useless, yet certain to kindle anger because it was looked upon as treason against the cherished charter.[840]
The fact should seem to be that he had thecertaminis gaudia—the joy of disputation; common to intellectual gladiators. Occasionally this got the better of his prudence; and when it did, like a skilful rider, he soon recovered the reins of his caution and made glad amends. On this occasion, he confessed his penitence for the ill which had arisen from the unfortunate polemic, and offered to burn the manuscript if the authorities chose to countenance the bon-fire.[841]
Roger Williams next pronounced himself upon an exciting local question. It was then a mooted point at Salem whether women were commanded to appear at church veiled.[842]Singularly enough, the radical Williams said Yes, and the conservative Cotton said No; the historic opponents for once changed places; and Cotton, going to Salem, handled the subject so convincingly in his morning sermon, that the ladies came to church in the afternoon unveiled; upon which “Williams, though unconvinced, desisted from opposition.”[843]
Behind these frivolities were graver issues. In1633, trouble seemed brewing between England and the Pilgrim colonists. Charles, Laud, and Strafford, had hinted at a “commission” for the regulation of the non-conforming American plantations; and the Privy Council had commanded Cradock to order the colonial charter home, to be “regulated.” The ex-president of the Massachusetts Company did write for it in 1634, and in 1635 “quo warranto”[844]was issued. But the provisional authorities, while answering Cradock’s missive, declined to return the charter.[845]
Affairs looked black indeed. Resistance was seriously contemplated; what was called the “freeman’s oath,” which bound the colonists to allegiance to the colony rather than to the king, was ordered to be subscribed throughout Massachusetts Bay; and at the same time it was decided to “avoid and protract.”[846]Nothing prevented England from launching her cohorts upon the plantations but the presence of those home troubles which now began to press the royalist party as closely as the serpents enveloped Laocöon. It was a time of general anxiety, and men cried Hush! and held their breath to see what should next occur.
But “Williams could not keep quiet in this seething world,” affirms Elliot; “nor could Endicott. Both of them saw the inevitable tendenciesof the Roman church; and feeling that such a church was dangerous to their infant liberties, they decided that the symbol under which the pope and Laud marched should not be their symbol: so Endicott cut the cross out of the king’s colors. At such a crisis, when the aim was to ‘avoid and protract,’ this audacious act of course made trouble; and Endicott, at the next court, was ‘sadly admonished,’ and disabled from office for a year.[847]Williams held peculiar views respecting oaths, and cited the Scripture command—‘swear not at all.’ And as the freeman’s oath clashed with the oath to the king, he also spoke against that, and dissuaded some from taking it.”[848]
Besides this, Roger Williams was an avowed democrat. He proclaimed this truth: “Kings and magistrates are invested with no more power than the people intrust to them.”[849]And he said again: “The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.”[850]Republicanism was the logical sequence of religious liberty—came from it as naturally as the bud expands into the flower. Yet it startled the Pilgrims. They were constantly making forays into the domain of absolutism. They never scrupled, when they had a chance, at clutching popular prerogatives. They were always busy in enacting democracy into law;but they were shocked when Roger Williams put it into propositions.
“Had Cromwell been in power at the time, with his republican bias,” remarks Felt, “these sentiments would have been crowned with approbation; but being uttered under one of the Stuarts, they were hissed as the expression of sedition. It has ever been in accordance with the spirit of human policy, that principles under the circumstances of one period are accounted patriotism, which under the circumstances of another era are denounced as treason.”[851]
Thus it was that the theories of Roger Williams “led him into perpetual collision with the clergy and the government of Massachusetts Bay. It had ever been their custom to respect the church of England, and in the mother-country, they had frequented its service; yet its principles and its administration were still harshly exclusive. The American reformer would hold no communion with intolerance; for, said he, ‘the doctrine of persecution for conscience’ sake is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.’
“The magistrates insisted on the presence of every man at public worship; Williams reprobated the law; the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public worshipthe irreligious and the unwilling, seemed like requiring hypocrisy. ‘An unbelieving soul is dead in sin’—such was his argument. ‘And to force the indifferent from one worship to another, is like shifting a dead man into several changes of apparel.’ He added: ‘No one should be forced to worship, or to maintain a worship against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from those who hire him.’
“The magistrates were selected exclusively from the church-members; with equal propriety, reasoned Williams, might ‘a doctor of physic or a pilot’ be selected according to his skill in theology and his standing in the church. It was objected, that his principles subverted all good government. ‘Oh no,’ said he; ‘the commander of the vessel of state may maintain order on board the ship and see that it pursues its course steadily, even though the dissenters of the crew be not compelled to attend the public prayers of their companions.’”[852]
The Pilgrims heard all this aghast. Soon they wearied of discussion; they invoked the syllogism of the law to rebut the heresies of the bold declaimer. Williams was cited in 1635, to appear before the General Court at Boston, for examination. Taking his staff in his hand, he set out. The session was stormy. Cotton argued; others scolded; Winthrop pleaded; Endicott was wrenched away from Williams’ side; but Williams, whilemaintaining some odd opinions, spoke boldly for God and liberty that day, and “maintained the rocky strength of his grounds.”[853]
“To the magistrates he seemed the ally of a civil faction; to himself he appeared only to make a frank avowal of the truth. The scholar who is accustomed to the pursuits of abstract philosophy, lives in a region of thought quite remote from that by which he is surrounded. The range of his understanding is aside from the paths of common minds, and he is often the victim of the contrast. ’Tis not unusual for the world to reject the voice of truth, because its tones are strange; to declare doctrines unsound, only because they are new; and even to charge obliquity or derangement on a man who brings forward principles which the average intelligence repudiates. ’Tis the common history; Socrates, and St. Paul, and Luther, and others of the most acute dialecticians, have been ridiculed as drivellers and madmen.”[854]
Roger Williams now evinced his kinship with the martyrs for human progress, by suffering that rejection common to those who venture to project their revolutionary thoughts from the front of a century’s advance. Misunderstood and condemned, he was commanded to abjure his heresies or else expect “sentence.”[855]
Of course, he could not reject himself; therefore,saying with Job, “Though I die, I will maintain my integrity,” he uncovered his head with serene patience to “bide the pelting of the pitiless storm.” The thunderbolt soon fell. The church at Salem was coerced into abandoning the immortal pastor; and in November, 1635, he was ordered “to depart out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay within six weeks;”[856]a sentence which is said to have been mainly due to Cotton’s eloquence.[857]
Finally, Williams was permitted to remain at Salem until the following spring, as the season then shivered on the verge of winter.[858]Then the Pilgrims grew alarmed; the reformer’s opinions were contagious; they thought, after all, that it would be best to send Williams home to England. A ship was about to sail; a warrant was issued; officers were despatched to arrest the disturber of that Israel. But on coming to his house and opening the door, they found “darkness there, and nothing more.” Roger Williams, apprized of the change of purpose, had quitted Salem “in winter snow and inclement weather.”[859]On, on he pressed, for Laud and the Tower of London were behind him. Without guide, without food, without shelter, he suffered tortures. “For fourteen weeks I was sorely tossed in a bitter season”—so he wrote in the evening of his life—“not knowing what bread or bed didmean.”[860]“But,” said he sweetly, “the ravens fed me in the wilderness;”[861]and he often made his habitation in the hollow of a tree. But nothing could daunt him. His cheerful faith,
“Exempt from public haunt,Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
“Exempt from public haunt,Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
“Exempt from public haunt,
Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
So he fled on, on, through the snow, the darkness, the dreary forest; “fled from Christians to the savages, who knew and loved him, till at last he reached the kind-hearted but stupid Indian heathen Massasoit.”[862]
This winter banishment of Roger Williams was cruel and bigoted, but it was not without palliation. He had run a tilt against the law and order of his time; he had sneered at the validity of the charter, then the fundamental law; he had impeached the theocracy; he had the dangerous advantage of being personally equipped with those gifts which win and “grapple to the soul with hooks of steel.” Every motive of worldly prudence seemed to dictate banishment. These things extenuate, but they do not excuse; because we are bound to impeach an untrue order. Paul cried, “God is God,” and trampled wicked laws beneath his feet. The catacombs of Pagan Rome were choked with martyrs who went against the law and order of their time. Huss and Wickliffe, Latimer and Ridley, violated law precisely as Roger Williamsdid. The law-breaker is not necessarily immoral and a pest. Society is bound to see that the statute-book does not fetter the human conscience. If society is recreant to its duty, individuals must not be false to God. Therefore, in this matter of opposing the colonial law, we hide Roger Williams behind the apostles, and enclose him within the leaves of the New Testament.
After months of vicissitude, the great exile reached the shores of Narragansett Bay, and founded Providence. As he floated down the stream in his canoe, and neared the site of the beautiful city born of his piety, the Indians shouted, “Wha-cheer, friend; wha-cheer?” and grasped his hand with cordial sympathy as he stepped ashore.[863]A large grant of land was easily obtained from Canonicus and Miantonomoh—easily obtained because of the love and favor which they bore him, since Williams says that money could not have bought it without affection and confidence[864]—and as the whole domain was his, he might have lived as lord-proprietor; but principle forbade. “On the hill the forests, just clothed in their full leafage, bowed their heads to this fugitive, the hero of a great idea, and whispered ‘Liberty!’”[865]
He heeded that whisper, and dedicated the infant state to the most radical idea of liberty; so that it became the asylum of the oppressed; andas the Hebrew prophet always prayed with his window open towards Jerusalem, so distressed consciences, when they felt the sting of persecution, murmured, Providence.
Roger Williams planted a democracy—a government of the people, by the people, for the people.[866]He cemented his state by toleration. “The removal of the yoke of soul-oppression,” said he, “as it will prove an act of mercy and righteousness to the enslaved nations, so it is of binding force to engage the whole and every interest and conscience to preserve the common liberty and peace.”[867]
So it proved; for, spite of Cotton Mather’s epigram, that it was “bona terra, mala gens”[868]—a good land and a wicked people—it increased and prospered from the outset, justifying the motto of the commonwealth,Amor vincet omnia.[869]
While Roger Williams believed in toleration, he did not believe in license, but was always earnest for liberty regulated by law. Thus when theRantersappeared and railed against all order, he invoked the judicial arm to suppress their madness.[870]But when the Quakers invaded the state, he attacked them only with syllogisms. He was ardently opposed to their tenets; but he essayed to “dig George Fox out of his burrows” with words only, and returned a stern “No” to the thrice-repeated requestof Massachusetts that they be expelled from his jurisdiction.[871]“We find,” he wrote, “that where these people are most of all supposed to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by argument, there they least of all desire to come.”[872]
In 1643, Williams went to England to obtain a charter for his plantation. He “found all in a flame; civil war raging, Hampden just killed, Charles fled from London, and the city and the government in the hands of the Parliament.” Here he lived on intimate terms with Sir Harry Vane and Milton, kindred spirits, who were doing in England what he had done in America. His mission was successful, and a twelvemonth later he returned to Providence with a liberal patent, the free-will offering of jubilant democracy across the water.[873]
Eight years later, under the Protectorate, Roger Williams once more visited England on colonial business; and his admission and recognition among the foremost thinkers of the time were general and hearty. The acquaintance with Vane and Milton was continued, and Marvell and Cromwell were added to his list of friends.[874]But his heart was in America, and in 1654 he came back to Providence;[875]whereupon he was elected president of the cluster of plantations which, in after-days, were moulded into the little state of Rhode Island.[876]
For many years Williams and his colony were under the frown of their brother Pilgrims; but through it all they bore cheerily up, trusting to God, time, and success, to remove all prejudice, and “keeping always to that one principle, ‘that every man should have liberty to worship God according to the light of his own conscience.’”[877]
Roger Williams had learned that most difficult of lessons, to return good for evil. He never wearied in well-doing; and his fine tact, broad statesmanship, and friendly zeal, on more than one occasion came between the colonists who had flung him into dishonorable banishment and impending harm.[878]With the Indians he was singularly influential, and frequently his presence at their camp-fires and in their wigwams served to explode a maturing conspiracy.[879]
On the Restoration, an event occurred which finely illustrates the beautiful text, that “He who goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” The American republican had been the warm friend and coadjutor of Cromwell, and Milton, and Pym. When Charles II. came to the throne, all looked to see his hand stretched across the Atlantic to menace and chastise. It was outstretched, but only to bless; for the foppish Stuart actually renewed the charterwhich the wise Protector had first granted to the Providence plantations. He paid unconscious homage to the principle of Roger Williams, and assented to what Gammel calls “the freest paper that ever bore the signature of a king—the wonder of the age.”[880]
Such was one instance of the influence of a man whose beneficent career is at once an example and an inspiration; not because he was always right or always wise, but because he was always true to his own ideal. Roger Williams was the initiator of many changes; and he, first of all in America, boldly framed the creed of democracy. But the brightest jewel in his crown is that he, taking his life in one hand and his good name in the other, “was the first reformer in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of all opinions before the law. At a time when Germany was the battle-field for all Europe in the implacable wars of religion; when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions; when France was still to go through a fearful struggle with bigotry; when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance; almost half a century before William Penn became an American proprietary; and two years before Descartes founded modern philosophy on the basis of free reflection,” Roger Williams demanded the enfranchisement of the human soul.
“We praise the man who first analyzed the air,or resolved water into its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds, even though the discoveries may have been as much the fruits of time as of genius. A moral principle has a much wider and nearer influence on human happiness; nor can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to society than that which establishes perpetual religious peace, and spreads tranquillity through every community and every bosom.
“If Copernicus is held in everlasting reverence because, on his death-bed, he published to the world that the sun is the centre of our system; if the name of Kepler is preserved in the annals of human excellence for his sagacity in detecting the laws of planetary motion; if the genius of Newton has been almost adored for dissecting a ray of light and weighing heavenly bodies in a balance—let there be for the name of Roger Williams at least some humble place among those who have advanced moral science, and made themselves the benefactors of mankind.”[881]