Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty

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Title: Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty
Author: Strickland, Arthur
Language: English
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PIONEER OF SOUL-LIBERTY ***

ROGER WILLIAMS

[Illustration: Statue of Roger Williams in Roger Williams Park,
Providence, R. I.]

ROGER WILLIAMS

PROPHET AND PIONEER OF SOUL-LIBERTY

_By_
ARTHUR B. STRICKLAND

[Illustration]

THE JUDSON PRESS

BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS NEW YORK
LOS ANGELES KANSAS CITY SEATTLE TORONTO

Published June, 1919

My Wife

SYMPATHETIC HELPER
AND
INSPIRING COMPANION
IN ALL MY WORK
THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY

INSCRIBED

BAPTIST SPARKS FROM A HEBREW ANVIL

“Even the absence of a definite experiment must not deter him. He
would create a society where the principles would be put to the
test. He would fashion a State where the Church and the crown would
be mutually helpful though independent. He would create a condition
of humanity where the sovereignty of the soul before God would be
respected, and where every man, believer or disbeliever, Gentile,
Jew, or Turk, would have untrammeled opportunity for the display and
exercise of the faith within him. Here lies the core of his heroism!”

CONCERNING THE MONUMENT AT ROGER WILLIAMS PARK

“This one monument speaks the gratitude of one State. But the whole
country has an eloquent voice of appreciation. Even as the tombstone
of Sir Christopher Wren, the builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intones
the larger praise when it says, ‘If you would see his monument, look
around you,’ so would we point to the great principles of equal and
religious freedom, written into the Constitution of forty-eight
States, and engraven on the minds of ninety millions of people in our
country and making their moral and civic influence felt all over the
civilized globe, as worthy tributes to the genius of Roger Williams.”

--_Extracts from Thanksgiving Address on “Roger Williams,” delivered
by Rabbi Abram Simon, Ph. D., to Reformed Congregation Keneseth
Israel, Philadelphia, November 24, 1912._

PREFACE

The four years of the great war have witnessed two astounding facts,
namely, the recrudescence of an ancient barbarism and the world-wide
application of the ideals of Christianity. During these momentous times
the frontiers of barbarism and of civilization were clearly marked. The
greater part of the world declared its position and took sides with one
or other of the contestants. The whole world was either for or against,
either friend or foe to, the essential principles of a Christian
civilization.

It was no accident that the torch of the Hun and the Cross of the
Christ should meet again on the old historic battle-ground between
the Somme and the Rhine, and especially at the Marne. We thank God in
victory’s hour that the Cross of the Christ is again triumphant, and
we trust the torch of the Hun is extinguished forever. Autocracy’s
serpent head has been crushed beneath the heel of a militant democracy.
That bruised heel is our reminder of the cost of victory. It staggers
the imagination to state in terms of manhood, materials, and money the
price we have paid to make a world safe for democracy.

The eyes of a world have been opened. Men have thought of Calvary, the
price the Son of God paid to redeem the wayward, wicked world. Men
through their Calvary have come to understand the message of Christ’s
Cross--that all men are of equal value in the sight of humanity’s
God, and therefore are entitled to equal privileges in the world he
has made for their happiness. Out from the shambles of these war-torn
years there has come forth, slowly and certainly, with ever-increasing
clearness, the shining form of the ideal supreme, the truth triumphant,
the principle of full, free, absolute soul-liberty.

As the thirsty caravan turns to the springs, as the mariner turns to
his compass in the darkest night, so the war-weary world--all parts
of it, both that of friend and that of foe--looks beseechingly to
America and to the ideal of which she is the great exemplar. From her
shores there went forth an army which under God turned the tide against
barbarism and made possible the final victory for civilization.
That army was composed of men whose fathers represented every nation
under heaven. Some who received the highest honor for distinguished
service were born under the very flags they sought to overthrow. It was
humanity’s army, dominated by ideals distinctly American, which fought,
not for military glory, not for hellish hatred, not for selfish gain,
but as the crusaders of a new order, of an international fraternity.

The distinctive feature of America’s greatness is not her boundless
wealth, not her limitless resources, not her inimitable versatility.
It is the ideal which she has inherited from her fathers. That ideal,
in the forefront of the world’s thought today, had its yesterday of
suffering and of sacrifice.

It is timely in the hour of democracy’s triumph to turn our thoughts
toward the genesis of soul-liberty in America. Today millions of
men espouse her sacred cause. In the dawn of American history, in
the early colonial times, a misunderstood, maligned, and persecuted
refugee, Roger Williams, stood almost alone as her defender. Driven
from motherland and from adopted home, he found among the savages
of the wilderness a place where he could live out his principles of
soul-liberty and grant freely to others what he desired for himself. He
has been rightly called “The First American,” because he was the first
to actualize in a commonwealth the distinctively American principle of
freedom for mind and body and soul.

Roger Williams was not the discoverer of the principle of soul-liberty.
What Jesus did and said was the torch of truth destined to illumine the
whole world. His death on the cross was the voice of God in eloquent
terms, telling us that all men were equal sharers in his love and
entitled to equal opportunities and privileges in the world which he
had made for man’s well-being. Christ taught clearly that men should
not force others to belief in him or to Christian conduct, nor destroy
those who failed to follow his teachings as they saw them.

For centuries faithful witnesses kept alive in the world these precious
truths. In fact, for a millennium the name Anabaptist or Baptist was
synonymous with soul-liberty. Baptists on the Continent and in England
sowed broadcast these seeds which led to a glorious harvest in the new
world. After the death of Roger Williams the Baptists in the colonies
continued the work so nobly begun by him. In the face of bitterest
persecution they labored for a century before the much-desired
principle of soul-liberty was interwoven into our National Constitution
and protected by the First Amendment.

Our Western Hemisphere represents two types of civilization. The Rio
Grande is the dividing line between a civilization which is Baptist in
its distinctive and essential character and one which is non-Baptist.
To the north we see what the democracy of the soul can do when
associated with the democracy of political rights. To the south we see
but the twilight of civilization, a place where there is political
democracy in name, but where it is rendered powerless because the
mind and soul do not enjoy full freedom. It is the difference between
religious democracy and religious autocracy. To the north the Bible is
loved, it is studied freely, and its principles are followed. It is a
land where the Bible is unchained and where the prevailing religions
are of a church without a bishop in a land without a king. To the south
the Bible is practically suppressed, its study is discouraged, and its
truths go unheeded.

Europe, thou art looking across the seas to America. Look to all three
Americas. Political democracy is universal in North, Central, and South
America. Ask thyself the question, Why is the civilization of the north
so attractive? It is because Religious Liberty is married to Political
Liberty. Dost thou want our blessedness? Then see to it that thy
new-born democracies and thine ancient ones have complete soul-liberty.
Give the Bible a chance to bless thy stricken lands. Let the truths
from God’s book do their revolutionary work for thee as they have for
God’s liberty land on this side of the sea.

Religious liberty has unchained the Bible, scattered the darkness of
superstition, flooded our continent with light and blessing. It has
toppled selfish autocrats from their thrones, it has unlocked the
shackles from the feet of millions who were living in spiritual and
physical slavery. Religious liberty opens the doors and lets God’s
sunlight of truth enter to warm and bless the world.

To Roger Williams and the historic Baptist denomination we turn for
the story of the genesis and growth of this great blessing in America.
There is an effort, in evidence in the secular and religious press
of America, and, in some sections, in many of our public schools, to
rob both Williams and the Baptists of their crown of glory. In certain
quarters both Protestants and Catholics are attributing the honor of
giving birth to religious liberty to communions which centuries ago
persecuted our Baptist forefathers unto banishment and death.

The early American Colonies can be divided into three classes. One
class included those who sought for uniformity in religion. Exile and
death were resorted to to make that religious uniformity possible.
Baptists were martyred in Massachusetts and Virginia. Another class
included those who granted a toleration to other Christian religions,
but who denied political privileges to Jews, infidels, or Unitarians.
Maryland and Pennsylvania, although far advanced from the persecuting
spirit of some of the colonies, belong to this second class. There was
another class, represented at first by the smallest of the colonies,
little Baptist Rhode Island, which gave full, absolute, religious
liberty. No political privilege was dependent on religious belief. The
attitude of the early colonists to the Jews is the acid test of their
claim to priority as the advocates of soul-liberty in America.

Hebrew scholars and statesmen do not hesitate to give their tribute of
honor to Roger Williams and the Baptists. The Hon. Oscar S. Straus,
twice American Ambassador to Turkey, Secretary of Labor and Commerce
in the late President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and President of the League
to Enforce Peace, said on January 13, 1919, on the eve of sailing for
Europe and the Peace Conference:

If I were asked to select from all the great men who have left their
impress upon this continent from the days that the Puritan Pilgrims
set foot on Plymouth Rock, until the time when only a few days ago
we laid to rest the greatest American in our generation--Theodore
Roosevelt; if I were asked whom to hold before the American people
and the world to typify the American spirit of fairness, of freedom,
of liberty in Church and State, I would without any hesitation select
that great prophet who established the first political community on
the basis of a free Church in a free State, the great and immortal
Roger Williams.... He became a Baptist, or as they were then called,
Anabaptist, because to his spirit and ideals the Baptist faith
approached nearer than any other--a community and a church which
is famous for never having stained its hands with the blood of
persecutors.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE APOSTLE OF SOUL-LIBERTY 1

II. THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE 27

III. THE HISTORIC CUSTODIANS OF SOUL-LIBERTY 57

IV. SOUL-LIBERTY AT HOME IN A COMMONWEALTH 79

V. FROM SOUL-LIBERTY TO ABSOLUTE CIVIL LIBERTY 103

VI. THE TORCH-BEARERS OF THE IDEAL OF ROGER WILLIAMS
UNTIL LIBERTY ENLIGHTENED THE WORLD 119

VII. THE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE OF ROGER WILLIAMS’
IDEAL 137

STUDY OUTLINE OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROGER
WILLIAMS 145

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 149

AN ITINERARY FOR A HISTORIC PILGRIMAGE 151

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author desires to express his indebtedness to the John Carter Brown
Library, Providence, R. I., to the “Providence Magazine,” to the Rhode
Island Historical Society, to the Roger Williams Park Museum, and to
the New York City Public Library, for valuable assistance rendered in
securing illustrations for this book.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

_Statue of Roger Williams_ _Frontispiece_

_Copy of Shorthand Found in Indian Bible_ 4

_Sir Edward Coke_ 5

_Charterhouse School_ 9

“_A Key into the Language of America_” 12

_Boston, 1632_ 13

_The Fort and Chapel on the Hill Where Roger Williams
Preached_ 13

_Pembroke College_ 17

_Fac-simile from Original Records of the Order for the
Banishment of Roger Williams_ 20

_Original Church at Salem, Mass._ 21

_Site of Home of Roger Williams in Providence, R. I._ 21

_Sun-dial and Compass Used by Roger Williams in His Flight_ 30

_Spring at the Seekonk Settlement_ 31

_Tablet Marking Seekonk Site_ 31

_What Cheer Rock. Landing-place of Roger Williams_ 31

_Original Deed of Providence from the Indians_ 35

_Williams’ Letter of Transference to His Loving Friends_ 39

_The Original Providence “Compact”_ 41

_The First Division of Home Lots in Providence_ 45

“_Simplicities Defence_” 47

_The Arrival of Roger Williams with the Charter_ 49

“_Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed_” 52

“_The Bloudy Tenent, ... discussed_” 53

_Roger Williams’ Reference to “An Humble Supplication”
in His “Bloudy Tenent”_ 54

“_Christenings make not Christians_” 63

_First Baptist Church of Providence_ 65

_Roger Mowry’s “Ordinarie.” Built 1653, Demolished 1900_ 65

_Interior of First Baptist Church, Providence_ 69

_Bell of First Baptist Church, Providence_ 73

“_The Fourth Paper, ... by Maior Butler_” 82

“_The Bloudy Tenent, Washed_” 84

“_The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody_” 85

“_The Hireling Ministry_” 87

“_Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health_” 88

“_George Fox Digg’d out of his Burrowes_” 90

_Models of Indian Village in Roger Williams Park Museum_ 91

“_A New-England Fire-Brand Quenched_” 94

_Rhode Island Historical Society Museum_ 95

_Apple Tree Root from the Grave of Roger Williams_ 95

_Grave of Roger Williams_ 95

_New Testament Title-page of Roger Williams’ Indian Bible_ 98

_Indian Bible Used by Roger Williams, the Pioneer Missionary
to the American Indians_ 99

_Original Home of Brown University, in Providence, R. I._ 109

_Brown University in Early Nineteenth Century_ 109

_Capitol Building in Providence, Where the Charter is Kept_ 113

_City Hall, Providence, Where the Compact, Indian Deed, and
Letter of Transference Are Kept_ 113

_Order Banishing the Founders of the First Baptist Church
in Boston_ 123

“_Ill Newes from New-England_” 125

_John Clarke Memorial, First Baptist Church of Newport, R. I._ 127

_Grave of John Clarke_ 127

_The Law in William Penn’s Colony_ 129

_The Law Concerning Religious Toleration in Maryland
Colony_ 130

_Puritan-Religious-Liberty!_ 131

_William Rogers_ 133

_James Manning_ 133

_Isaac Backus_ 133

THE APOSTLE OF SOUL-LIBERTY

That body-killing, soul-killing, state-killing doctrine of not
permitting but persecuting all other consciences and ways of worship
but his own in the civil state.... Whole nations and generations of
men have been forced (though unregenerate and unrepentant) to pretend
and assume the name of Jesus Christ, which only belongs, according to
the institution of the Lord Jesus, to truly regenerate and repentant
souls. Secondly, that all others dissenting from them, whether Jews or
Gentiles, their countrymen especially (for strangers have a liberty),
have not been permitted civil habitation in this world with them,
but have been distressed and persecuted by them.--_Roger Williams’
Estimate of Religious Persecution._

The principle of religious liberty did not assert itself, save in one
instance, at once that American colonization was begun. For the most
part, the founders of these colonies came to this country imbued with
the ideas concerning the relations between government and religion,
which had been universal in Europe.... This makes the attitude of our
American exception, Roger Williams, the more striking and significant.
More than one hundred years in advance of his time, he denied the
entire theory and practice of the past.--_Sanford Cobb._

Roger Williams advocated the complete separation of Church and
State, at a time when there was no historical example of such
separation.--_Newman._

THE APOSTLE OF SOUL-LIBERTY

A government of the people, formed by the people for the people, with
Church and State completely separate, and with political privileges
not dependent on religious belief, was organized and maintained
successfully for the first time in Christendom in Rhode Island, the
smallest of the American Colonies. Its inspiration and founder was
Roger Williams, the apostle of soul-liberty. Because he was the first
asserter of the principle which has since been recognized as the
distinctive character of our national greatness, he has been called
“The First American.”

Little is known of the personal appearance of Roger Williams. His
contemporaries describe him as a man of “no ordinary parts,” with “a
never-failing sweetness of temper and unquestioned piety.” They also
said he was a man of “unyielding tenacity of purpose, a man who could
grasp a principle in all its bearings and who could incorporate it in
a social compact.” “He was no crude, unlearned agitator, but a scholar
and thinker.” Governor Bradford speaks of him as “having many precious
parts.” Governor Winthrop refers to him as “a godly minister.”

The artist’s conception, based upon these characteristics, is best
expressed by a monument in Roger Williams Park, Providence, R. I.
It is the work of Franklin Simmons, and was erected by the city of
Providence in 1877. In a beautiful park of over four hundred acres
with hills and drives and lakes, surrounded by trees and shrubbery,
and on land originally purchased from the Indians by Williams, the
illustrious pioneer of a new order is seen in heroic form. He seems to
be looking out over the very colony he formed. In his hand he holds a
volume, entitled “Soul-Liberty, 1636,” a title which has since become
synonymous with his name. History is seen writing “1636,” the birth
year of soul-liberty in America. She continues to write with increasing
appreciation of the far-reaching influence of this illustrious hero of
religious and political democracy.

[Illustration: Copy of Shorthand Found on Fly-leaf of Roger Williams’
Indian Bible]

For many years scholars thought that Roger Williams was born at the
close of the sixteenth century at Gwinear, Cornwall, England. Now it
is generally believed that he was born in London, England, in the
opening years of the seventeenth century. He had two brothers and a
sister. His father was a tailor. About this time Timothy Bright and
Peter Bales introduced into England a new method of writing which was
called “shorthand.” The boy Roger Williams learned it and visited the
famous Star Chamber to put it into practice. The judge noticed the lad
and inspected his work. To his amazement, the record was complete and
accurate. This judge, Sir Edward Coke, the most distinguished lawyer
and jurist of his day, immediately took an interest in the lad, and
became his patron, securing for Williams admission to the Charterhouse
School. This was the school where John Wesley, Thackeray, Addison, and
others were educated. He was admitted as a pensioner, in June, 1621.
Later, through Coke’s influence, he was admitted to Pembroke College,
Cambridge, in June, 1623. He was graduated with the degree of bachelor
of arts in 1627, and the year following was admitted to holy orders.
About this time he was disappointed in a love affair, the lady of his
choice being Jane Whalley. He sought permission of her aunt, Lady
Barrington, to marry her. When refused, he wrote a striking letter
in which he predicted for Lady Barrington a very unhappy hereafter
unless she repented.

[Illustration: Sir Edward Coke Courtesy of “Providence Magazine”]

In 1629, we find him at High Laves, Essex, not far from Chelmesford,
where Thomas Hooker, later the founder of Hartford Colony, was
minister. Here he also met John Cotton. Men’s views at that time were
changing. The people of the Established Church were divided into three
classes. One stood by the Established Order in all things; another
class of Puritans sought to stay by the Church, but aimed to purify the
movement; the third class was for absolute separation. Williams, with
hundreds of others, was disturbed. The anger of Lady Barrington and the
suspicions of Archbishop Laud started a persecution which drove him out
of England. He said:

I was persecuted in and out of my father’s house. Truly it was as
bitter as death to me when Bishop Laud pursued me out of the land,
and my conscience was persuaded against the national church, and
ceremonies and bishops.... I say, it was as bitter as death to me when
I rode Windsor way to take ship at Bristol.

Many years later he wrote:

He (God) knows what gains and preferments I have refused in
universities, city, country, and court in old England, and something
in New England, to keep my soul undefiled in this point and not to act
with a doubting conscience.

Before leaving England, he was married. The only information we have
in regard to his wife, up to that time, is that her name was Mary
Warned. They sailed on the ship Lyon, from Bristol, England, December
1, 1630. After a tempestuous journey of sixty-six days they arrived off
Nantasket, February 5, 1631. Judge Durfee speaks thus of this flight:

He was obliged to fly or dissemble his convictions, and for him, as
for all noblest natures, a life of transparent truthfulness was alone
an instinct and a necessity. This absolute sincerity is the key to
his character, as it was always the mainspring of his conduct. It was
this which led him to reject indignantly the compromises with his
conscience which from time to time were proposed to him. It was this
which impelled him when he discovered a truth to proclaim it, when he
detected an error to expose it, when he saw an evil, to try and remedy
it, and when he could do a good, even to his enemies, to do it.

Upon his arrival in Boston he was invited to become the teacher in
the Boston church, succeeding Mr. Wilson who was about to return to
England. To his surprise, he discovered that the Boston church was a
church _unseparated from_ the Established Church of England, and he
felt conscientiously bound to decline their invitation. The Boston
people, who believed their church to be the “most glorious on earth,”
were astonished at his refusal. Williams would not act as their teacher
unless they publicly repented of their relation to the Established
Order. It was perfectly natural that a soul with convictions, such as
Williams possessed, should desire to be absolutely separated from the
Established Order. One incident from many will show the spirit of the
Established Church in England toward those within its ranks who had
become Puritan, let alone Separatist. Neal, in his “History of the
Puritans,” tells, of Doctor Leighton’s persecution in England. He was
arrested by Archbishop Laud and the following sentence was passed upon
him: That he be

committed to the prison of the Fleet for life, and pay a fine of ten
thousand pounds; that the High Commission should degrade him from his
ministry, and that he should be brought to the pillory at Westminster,
while the court was sitting and be publicly whipped; after whipping
be set upon the pillory a convenient time, and have one of his ears
cut off, one side of his nose split, and be branded in the face with a
double S. S. for a sower of sedition: that then he should be carried
back to prison, and after a few days be pilloryed a second time in
Cheapside, and have the other side of his nose split, and his other
ear cut off and then be shut up in close prison for the rest of his
life.

In the district in which Roger Williams lived this sentence was carried
out in all its hellish cruelty just prior to Williams’ banishment from
England. Do we blame the exile Williams for repudiating the movement
which at that hour was so wicked in its persecutions? He meant to
have a sea between him and a thing so hateful. John Cotton said that
Williams looked upon himself as one who “had received a clearer
illumination and apprehension of the state of Christ’s kingdom, and
of the purity of church communion, than all Christendom besides.”
Cotton Mather said that Williams had “a windmill in his head.” Well for
America that such a windmill was there and that he was a prophet with
clear visions of truth.

[Illustration: Charterhouse School Courtesy of “Providence Magazine”]

After refusing the Boston church, Roger Williams was invited by the
Salem church to be assistant to Mr. Skelton, their aged teacher.
He accepted their invitation and became Teacher, April 12, 1631.
The General Court in Boston remonstrated with the Salem church. The
persecution of this court led doubtless to his retirement from Salem at
the close of that summer.

He left the Massachusetts Bay Colony and became assistant to Ralph
Smith, the pastor at Plymouth. The Plymouth people, being strict
Separatists, were more congenial company, since they had withdrawn
from the Established Order to form a church after the pattern of the
Primitive Church model. Williams remained in Plymouth for about two
years. Governor Bradford soon detected his advanced positions, relative
to separation of Church and State, but considered it “questionable
judgment.” He praised his qualities as a minister, writing thus of him:

His teaching, well approved, for þe benefit whereof I still bless
God, and am thankful to him, even for his sharpest admonitions and
reproofs, so far as they agreed with truth.

Governor Winthrop, with Mr. Wilson, teacher of the Boston church,
visited Plymouth at this time.

They were very kindly treated and feasted every day at several houses.
On the Lord’s Day, there was a sacrament which they did partake in;
and, in the afternoon, Mr. Roger Williams (according to their custom)
propounded a question, to which the Pastor, Mr. Smith, spoke briefly;
then Mr. Williams prophesied; and after the Governor of Plymouth spoke
to the question. Then the elder (Mr. William Brewster) desired the
Governor of Massachusetts and Mr. Wilson to speak to it, which they
did. When this was ended, the deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation
in mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon the Governor and all
the rest went down to the deacon’s seat, and put into the box and then
returned.

Williams came in contact with the Indians who visited Plymouth from
time to time, and gained the confidence of Massasoit, the father of
the famous Philip. He studied their language and cultivated their
friendship. He writes in one of his letters, “My soul’s desire was
to do the natives good!” Near the close of his life he referred to
this early experience: “God was pleased to give me a painful patient
spirit, to lodge with them in their filthy smoke, to gain their
tongue.” Surely the Providence of God was thus preparing the way for
the founding of a new colony, to be made possible through these very
Indians who had implicit confidence in this man of God.

[Illustration]

A KEY into the

LANGUAGE

_OF_

AMERICA:

_OR_,

An help to the _Language_ of the _Natives_
in that part of AMERICA, called
_NEW-ENGLAND_.

Together, with briefe _Observations_ of the Customes,
Manners and Worships, _&c._ of the
aforesaid _Natives_, in Peace and Warre,
in Life and Death.

On all which are added Spirituall _Observations_,
Generall and Particular by the _Authour_, of
chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions,) to
all the _English_ Inhabiting those parts;
yet pleasant and profitable to
the view of all men:

_BY_ ROGER WILLIAMS
of _Providence_ in _New-England_.

_LONDON_,
Printed by _Gregory Dexter_, 1643.

[Illustration: Boston, 1632 From an old print]

[Illustration: The Fort and Chapel on the Hill Where Roger Williams
Preached Used by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.]

Williams was Pauline in his self-supporting ministry. He wrote: “At
Plymouth I spake on the Lord’s Day and week days and worked hard at my
hoe for my bread (and so afterward at Salem until I found them to be
an unseparated people).” His ministry made friends and foes. His foes
feared he would run the same course of Anabaptist behavior as did John
Smith, the Se-Baptist, at Amsterdam. Early in August his first child
was born, and was named Mary after her mother. Later in the same month,
he became for a second time the assistant to Mr. Skelton, at Salem. A
number of choice spirits, who had been attracted to his ministry, went
with him. He requested a letter of dismission from the Plymouth church
to unite with the Salem church. This was granted, but with a caution
as to his advanced views. To advocate the separation of Church and
State placed a man at that time with the “Anabaptists,” as this was
considered their great distinctive doctrine.

He commenced his labors at Salem under this cloud and also with the
General Court in Boston very suspicious of his work. Already there was
the distant rumbling of a storm which would eventually drive him into
exile.

The ministers of the Bay Colony, from the churches of Boston, Newtowne
(Cambridge), Watertown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Salem, and elsewhere, were
accustomed to meet for discussion and common interest. Roger Williams
feared that this might lead to a presbytery or superintendency, to the
prejudice of local church liberty. He loathed everything which might
make for intolerance.

In December, 1633, he forwarded to the governor and his assistants a
document which he had prepared at Plymouth, in which he disputed their
right to have the land by the king’s grant. Williams claimed, “they
have no title except they compounded with the natives.” He also accused
King James of telling a lie in claiming to be “the first Christian
prince to discover this new land.” This treatise had never been
published or made public. Its appearance now terrified the governor and
the assistants, for at that very time they were holding the possession
to their colony on a charter originally given for a different purpose.
It had been granted in England to a trading company, and its transfer
was questionable. They feared the king might withdraw it. This treatise
of Williams would be considered treason by the king. They met on
December twenty-seventh and counseled with Williams. Seeing the grave
danger to the colony, he agreed to give evidence of loyalty. Today we
do not question the ethical correctness of the advanced position held
by Williams.

It was not long before this pioneer of soul-liberty raised a new
question concerning “the propriety of administering an oath, which
is an act of worship, to either the unwilling or the unregenerate.”
Williams’ position was peculiarly obnoxious to the magistrates who
were then on the point of testing the loyalty of the colonists by
administering an oath of allegiance which was to be, in reality,
allegiance to the colony instead of to the king. The Court was called
to discuss the new objection to its policy. Mr. Cotton informs us that
the position was so well defended by Williams that “it threatened the
court with serious embarrassment.” The people supported Williams’
position, and the court was compelled to desist. On the death of
Skelton, in August, 1634, the Salem church installed Roger Williams
as their teacher. This act gave great offense to the General Court in
Boston. Williams commenced anew his agitation against the right to own
land by the king’s patent. The Salem church and Williams were both
cited to appear before the General Court, July 18, 1635, to answer
complaints made against them.

The elders gave their opinion:

He who would obstinately maintain such opinions (whereby a church
might run into heresy, apostasy, or tyranny, and yet the civil
Magistrates may not intermeddle) ought to be removed, and that the
other churches ought to request the Magistrates so to do.

The church and the pastor were notified “to consider the matter until
the next General Court, and then to recant, or expect the court to take
some final action.” At this same court, the Salem people petitioned
for a title to some land at Marblehead Neck, which was theirs, as they
believed, by a just claim. The court refused even to consider this
claim, “until there shall be time to test more fully the quality of
your allegiance to the power which you desire should be interposed on
your behalf.” Professor Knowles says:

Here is a candid avowal that justice was refused to Salem, on the
question of civil right, as a punishment for the conduct of church and
pastor. A volume could not more forcibly illustrate the danger of a
connection between the civil and ecclesiastical power.

[Illustration: Pembroke College Reduced from Loggan’s print, taken
about 1688]

Teacher and people at Salem were indignant, and a letter was addressed
to the churches of the colony in protest against such injustice. The
churches were asked to admonish the magistrates and deputies within
their membership. These churches refused or neglected to do this. In
some cases the letters never came before the church. Williams then
called on his own church to withdraw communion with such churches. It
declined to do this, and he withdrew from the Salem church, preaching
his last sermon, August 19, 1635. Here was a repetition of the first
conflict. Straus writes:

Here stood the one church already condemned, with sentence
suspended over it. Against it were arrayed the aggregate power of
the colony--its nine churches, the priests, and the magistrates.
What could the Salem church and community do, threatened with
disfranchisement, its deputies excluded from the General Court, and
its petition for land to which it was entitled, denied? Dragooned into
submission it had to abandon its persecuted minister to struggle alone
against the united power of Church and State. To deny Williams the
merit of devotion to a principle in this contest, wherein there was
no alternative but retraction or banishment, is to belie history in
order to justify bigotry, and to convert martyrdom into wrong-headed
obstinacy. This is exactly what Cotton sought to do in his version of
the controversy given ten years later in order to vindicate himself
and his church brethren from the stigma of their acts in the eyes of
a more enlightened public opinion in England. Williams pursued no
half-hearted or half-way measures. He stood unshaken upon the firm
ground of his convictions, and declared to the Salem church that he
could no longer commune with them, thereby entirely separating himself
from them and them from him.

He went so far as to refuse to commune with his own wife in the new
communion which he formed in his own home, until she would completely
withdraw from the Salem church.

The time for the next General Court drew near. The Salem church letter
and Williams’ withdrawal from his church made his foes determined to
crush him. They had thoughts of putting him to death.

[Illustration: Fac-simile from Original Records of the Order for the
Banishment of Roger Williams.]

[Sidenote: 1635. 3rd Sept.]

Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church of Salem,
hath broached and divulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against
the aucthorite of magistrates, as also with others of defamcon,
both of the magistrates and churches here, and that before any
conviccon, and yet maintaineth the same without retraccon, it is
therefore ordered, that the said Mr. Williams shall depte out of
this jurisdiccon within sixe weekes nowe nexte ensueing, wch if hee
neglect to pforme, it shall be lawfull for the Gouv’r and two of the
magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccon, not to
returne any more without licence from the Court.

The General Court convened in the rude meeting-house of the church
in Newtowne (Cambridge), on the corner of Dunster and Mill Streets.
Williams maintained his positions. He was asked if he desired a month
to reflect and then come and argue the matter before them. He declined,
choosing “to dispute presently.” Thomas Hooker, minister at Newtowne,
was appointed to argue with him on the spot, to make him see his
errors. Williams’ positions had a “rockie strength” and he was ready,
“not only to be bound and banished, but to die also in New England; as
for the most holy truths of God in Christ Jesus.” He would not recant.
So the Court met the following day, Friday, October 9, 1635, and passed
the following sentence:

Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church of Salem,
hath broached and divulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against
the aucthorite of magistrates, as also with letters of defamcon,
both of the magistrates and churches here, and that before any
conviccon, and yet maintaineth the same without retraccon, it is
therefore ordered, that the said Mr. Williams shall depte out of
this jurisdiccon within sixe weekes nowe nexte ensueing, wch if hee
neglect to pforme, it shall be lawfull for the Gouv’r and two of the
magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccon, not to
returne any more without licence from the Court.

[Illustration: Original Church at Salem, Mass.]

[Illustration: Site of Home of Roger Williams in Providence, R. I.]

Although Williams had withdrawn from the church at Salem, yet his
character was such that the town was indignant at this decree of the
court. About this time, his second child was born. Like the prophets
of old, he gave the child a significant name, calling her “Freeborn.”
Mr. Williams’ health at this time was far from being robust. A stay
of sentence was therefore granted, and he was to be allowed to remain
until the following spring. He did not refrain from advocating his
opinions, and soon the authorities heard of meetings in his house at
Salem and of twenty who were prepared to go with him to found a new
colony at the head of the Narragansett Bay. At its January meeting,
the Court decided to send him to England at once in a ship then about
to return. He was cited to appear in Boston, but reported inability
due to his impaired health. They then sent a pinnace for him by sea.
Being forewarned, he fled to the wilderness in the depths of which, for
fourteen weeks, he suffered the hardships of a New England winter.

* * * * *

The original Roger Williams Church is still preserved at Salem. The
first church in the first town of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was at
the corner of Washington and Essex Streets. There is a brick structure
there now and a marble tablet marks it as the site of the first church
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On another tablet, is the inscription:

The frame of the first Meeting House in which the civil affairs of the
Colony were transacted, is preserved and now stands in the rear of
Plummer Hall.

Plummer Hall is on Essex Street not very far from the First Church.
In the rear is the Roger Williams Church, a small building, measuring
twenty feet long by seventeen wide by twelve high at its posts.
Originally it had a gallery over the door at the entrance and a
minister’s seat in the opposite corner. On the wall opposite to the
entrance is a list of its succession of pastors and the years of their
service:

Francis Higginson 1629-1630
Samuel Skelton 1629-1634
Roger Williams 1631-1635
Hugh Peters 1636-1641 etc., etc.

It could accommodate about one hundred people. There were only forty
families in Salem in 1632. There were only six houses, besides that
of Governor Endicott, when Higginson arrived in 1629. Here in this
ancient meeting-house Roger Williams preached those truths which led to
his banishment. From its pulpit came, clearly stated, the ideals that
millions have since accepted. The glory of the Sistine Chapel in Rome,
or the Royal Sancte Chapella, of Paris, can never equal the glory of
this crude edifice, the cradle of religious liberty in the New World.

The Roger Williams Home at Salem is still preserved. It is better known
as “the Witch House” because it was occupied by Judge Carwin, one of
the judges connected with the tragedy of 1692. It stands at the western
corner of Essex and North Streets. It was built by the founder of Rhode
Island and was at that time second only to the Governor’s home. Though
it has been altered and repaired, the original rooms in this building
are as follows: The eastern room on the first floor, 18 × 21½, and
the room directly over it, 20 × 21½; the western room on the first
floor, 16½ × 18, and the room over it, 16½ × 20. The chimney is 8 ×
12. The part of the house which retains its original appearance is the
projecting corner of the western part, fronting on Essex Street. Roger
Williams mortgaged this house, “for supplies,” to establish the colony
at Providence.

Mr. Upham, in his report to the Essex Institution, says of this
wonderful house:

Here, within these very walls, lived, two hundred and fifty years
ago, that remarkable and truly heroic man, who, in his devotion to
the principle of free conscience, and liberty of belief, untrammeled
by civil power, penetrated in midwinter in the depths of an unknown
wilderness to seek a new home, a home which he could find only among
savages, whose respect for the benevolence and truthfulness of his
character made them, then and ever afterward, his constant friends.
From this spacious and pleasant mansion, he fled through the deep
snows of a New England forest, leaving his wife and young children to
the care of Providence, whose silent “voice” through the conscience,
was his only support and guide. The State which he founded may ever
look back with a just pride upon the history of Roger Williams.

THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE

A community on the unheard-of principles of absolute religious liberty
combined with perfect civil democracy.--_Professor Mason._

Thus for the first time in history a form of government was adopted
which drew a clear and unmistakable line between the temporal and the
spiritual power, and a community came into being which was an anomaly
among the nations.--_Prof. J. L. Diman._

No one principle of political or social or religious policy lies
nearer the base of American institutions and has done more to shape
our career than this principle inherited from Rhode Island, and it
may be asserted that the future of America was in a large measure
determined by that General Court which summoned Roger Williams to
answer for “divers new and dangerous opinions,” and his banishment
became a pivotal act in universal history.--_Prof. Alonzo Williams._

In summing up the history of the struggle for religious liberty it
may be said that papal bulls and Protestant creeds have favored
tyranny. Theologians of the sixteenth century and philosophers of
the seventeenth, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes, favored the State
churches. It was bitter experience of persecution that led jurists,
and statesmen of Holland and France, in face of the opposition of
theologians and philosophers, to enforce the toleration of dissent.
While there was toleration in Holland and France, there was, for the
first time, in the history of the world in any commonwealth, liberty
and equality and separation of Church and State in Rhode Island.--_W.
W. Evarts, in “The Long Road to Freedom of Worship.”_

In the code of laws established by them, we read for the first time
since Christianity ascended the throne of the Cæsars, the declaration
that conscience should be free and men should not be punished for
worshiping God in the way they were persuaded he requires.--_Judge
Story._

THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE

Roger Williams left Salem on or about January 15, 1636, making the
journey alone through the forests. With a pocket compass, and a
sun-dial to tell the hours, he set out, probably taking the road to
Boston for some distance. Nearing Boston, presumably at Saugus, he went
west for a while and then straight south until he reached the home
of Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem, at Mount Hope, near Bristol. The
ground was covered with snow, and he must have suffered sorely on this
journey of eighty or ninety miles. Thirty-five years later in a letter
to Major Mason, he refers to this experience:

First, when I was unkindly and unchristianly, as I believe, driven
from my house and land, and wife and children (in the midst of a New
England winter, now about thirty-five years past), at Salem, that
ever-honored Governor, Mr. Winthrop, privately wrote me to steer my
course to Narragansett Bay and the Indians, for many high and public
ends, encouraging me, from the freeness of the place from any English
claims or patents. I took his prudent notion as a hint and voice from
God, and waving all other thoughts and notions, I steered my course
from Salem (though in winter snow, which I feel yet) unto those parts
wherein I may say “Peniel”; that is, I have seen the face of God.

He also wrote: “I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter
winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean!” In his old
age he exclaimed, “I bear to this day in my body the effects of that
winter’s exposure.” In one of his books he refers to “hardships of sea
and land in a banished condition.”

The precious relics of this flight are the sun-dial and compass, now in
the possession of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Williams finally reached Seekonk Cove, about the twenty-third of
April. The spot was at Manton’s Neck, near the cove, where there was
a good spring of water. Here he was joined by four companions, his
wife, and two children. “I gave leave to William Harris, then poor and
destitute,” said Williams, “to come along in my company. I consented to
John Smith, miller at Dorchester (banished also), to go with me, and,
at John Smith’s desire, to a poor young fellow, Francis Wickes, as also
a lad of Richard Waterman’s.” The latter was doubtless Thomas Angell.
Joshua Verein came later. Some historians think that others joined them
at the Seekonk before they were compelled to leave. Here they remained
for two months. After providing rude shelters and sowing seeds, they
received a warning to move on. “I received a letter,” said Williams,

from my ancient friend, Mr. Winslow, the Governor of Plymouth,
professing his own and others’ love for me, yet lovingly advising me,
since I was fallen into the edge of their bounds, and they were loathe
to displease the Bay, to remove to the other side of the water, and
there, he said, I had the country free before me, and might be free as
themselves, and we should be loving neighbors together.

[Illustration: Sun-dial and Compass Used by Roger Williams in His
Flight Courtesy of “Providence Magazine”]

His removal cost him the “loss of a harvest that year.” Historians are
agreed that about the end of June he left Seekonk. The two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary was celebrated, June 23 and 24, 1886. Embarking
in a crude Indian canoe, Williams and his companions, six in all,
crossed over the river to a little cove on the west side, where they
were halted by a party of Indians, with the friendly interrogation,
“What cheer?” Here the party landed on a rock which has been known ever
since as “What Cheer Rock.” The cove is now filled and the rock covered
from sight. A suitable monument has been erected over the rock. It
is in an open park space at the corner of Roger and Williams Streets,
Providence. A piece of this rock is preserved at the First Baptist
Church of Providence, and another has recently been placed in cross
form in the lobby floor of the new Central Baptist Church of the same
city. It is hoped that a piece of this rock will be worked into the
National Baptist Memorial in our country’s capital.

[Illustration: Spring at the Seekonk Settlement]

[Illustration: Tablet Marking Seekonk Site]

[Illustration: What Cheer Rock. Landing-place of Roger Williams]

After friendly salutations with the Indians, they reembarked and made
their way down the river around the headland of Tockwotten and past
Indian and Fox points, where they reached the mouth of the Moshassuck
River. Rowing up this beautiful stream, then bordered on either side
with a dense forest, they landed on the east side of the river,
where there was an inviting spring. Here, on the ascending slopes
of the hill, they commenced a new settlement, which Williams called
“Providence,” in gratitude to God’s merciful Providence to them in
their distress. Later, when they spread out in larger numbers and in
all directions from this place, it was called “Providence Plantations.”
They prepared shelters for their families, probably wigwams made
of poles covered with hemlock boughs and forest leaves. We can in
imagination see them climb the hill to a point where Prospect Street
now runs, to enjoy a wider view of their new territory.

From that height of almost two hundred feet they saw to the westward,
through openings in the forest, the cove at the head of the great salt
river with broad sandy beaches on the eastern and northern shores
and salt marshes bordering the western and southern. From the north
the sparkling waters of the Moshassuck River came leaping over the
falls as it emptied itself into the estuary at its mouth. Bordering
this stream was a valley of beauty and fertility. The clear waters
of the Woonasquatucket threaded their way from the west through
another fertile valley. Between these rivers and also southward (of
the Woonasquatucket) was a sandy plateau, covered with pine forests
stretching to the Indian town of Mashapaug on the southwest and
Pawtuxet Valley to the south. Between the edge of the tidal flow and
the open waters of the great salt river there was a salt marsh dotted
with islands, beyond which rose the bold peak of Weybosset Hill.
Down the river to the south they saw the steep hills of Sassafras
and Field’s Point, beyond which could be seen the lower bay and its
forest-covered shores and islands. The eastern slope of the hill
stretched a mile toward the shore of the Seekonk. To the northeast
the view was cut off by a higher eminence covered with oak and pine.
In all directions, save that of the bay itself, the farther distances
were lost in an indistinguishable maze of forest-crowned heights. At
the feet of the spectators was the place of their immediate settlement,
where the western slope of the hill gradually diminished in height
toward the south. At its lowest extremity, Fox Point projected into the
bay. This slope was covered with a growth of oak and hickory.

A PURCHASED POSSESSION

Roger Williams differed from the ordinary colonists of his age, who
held that the Indian, being heathen, had no real ownership of the
land. It belonged to the Christians who might first claim it by right
of discovery. Williams, who “always aimed to do the Indians only
good,” recognized Indian ownership and secured his colony from them
by purchase. Here among them he first sought to apply his doctrine of
soul-liberty. To him they were humans with equal rights and privileges.
He bitterly fought the Puritan position that the pagan heathen had
no property rights which the Christian, with his superior culture,
was bound to respect. Roger Williams insisted that the land should be
purchased from the Indians, the original owners. He gained the lasting
respect of the Indian and the undying animosity of the Puritan for
holding to ideals which have since come to be recognized as American.
He thus laid the foundation for the belief in America that the weaker
and smaller powers have rights which the greater powers must respect,
a belief which led us into the recent great war. While this principle
is receiving world-wide application, let us not forget that Roger
Williams was the pioneer of international justice in America, if not
in the world. The land viewed from the top of the hill was owned by
five distinct Indian tribes. The Narragansetts dominated over all the
lands now occupied by Rhode Island, and ruled over all other lesser
tribes in this territory. In the northern part of this State, the
Nipmucs lived in the place now occupied by Smithfield, Glocester, and
Burrilville. On the southern seacoast border dwelt the Niantics. Part
of the Wampanoag tribe dwelt in Cumberland and extended to the western
side of the river which we now call the Blackstone. The Pequots lived
in Connecticut Colony. Indian government was monarchial, and became
extinct with the slaughter of the last of the line of rulers or sachems
in the massacre of July 2, 1676. Canonicus was the ruling sachem when
the English first came. As he grew old he needed an assistant and his
nephew, Miantonomo, was appointed. Miantonomo worked well with the
elder chief. He never succeeded to the position of ruling chief, being
murdered in 1643. Roger Williams secured his land from these sachems.
Williams wrote in 1661 as follows:

I was the procurer of the purchase, not by monies, nor payments, the
natives being so shy and jealous, that monies could not do it, but
by that language, acquaintance, and favor with the natives and other
advantages which it pleased God to give me, and also bore the charges
and venture of all the gratuities which I gave to the great Sachems
and natives round about us, and lay engaged for a loving and peaceable
neighborhood with, to my great charge and travel.

[Illustration: Original Deed of Providence from the Indians]

He found Indian gifts very costly. Presents were made frequently.
He allowed the Indians to use his pinnace and shallop at command,
transporting and lodging fifty at his home at a time. He never denied
them any lawful thing. Canonicus had freely what he desired from Roger
Williams’ trading-post at Narragansett. William Harris stated in 1677
that Roger Williams had paid thus one hundred and sixty pounds ($800)
for Providence and Pawtucket.

Mr. Williams generously admitted the first twelve proprietors of the
Providence Purchase to an equal share with himself, without exacting
any remuneration. The thirty pounds which he received were paid by
succeeding settlers, at the rate of thirty shillings each. This was not
a payment for the land but what he called “a loving gratuity.” Straus
says:

He might have been like William Penn, the proprietor of his colony,
after having secured it by patent from the rulers in England, and thus
have exercised a control over its government and enriched himself and
family. But this was not his purpose, nor was it directly or remotely
the cause for which he suffered banishment and misery. Principle--not
profit; liberty--not power; conviction--not ambition, were his
impelling motives which he consistently maintained, theoretically and
practically then, and at all times.

Williams’ own words were:

I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for
conscience. I then considering the conditions of divers of my
distressed countrymen, I communicated my said purchase unto my loving
friends (whom he names) who desired to take shelter with me.

He afterward purchased, jointly with Governor Winthrop, the Island of
Prudence from Canonicus. He also purchased, a little later, the small
islands of Patience and Hope, afterward selling his interest in them to
help pay his expenses to England on business for the colony.

Following is a true copy of the Original Deed of Land for Providence
from _Canonicus_ and _Miantonomo_:

At Nanhiggansick, the 24th of the first month, commonly called March,
in the second year of the Plantations of Plantings at Mooshausick or
Providence. Memorandum that we Caunaunicus and Meauntunomo, the two
chief sachems of Nanhiggansick, having two years since sold unto Roger
Williams, the lands and meadows upon the two fresh rivers, called
Mooshausick and Wanasquatucket, do now by these presents, establish
and confirm the bounds of those lands, from the river and fields at
Pawtucket, the great hill of Neotackonkonutt, on the northwest, and
the town of Mashapauge on the west. As also in consideration of the
many kindnesses and services he hath continually done for us, both
with our friends of Massachusetts, as also at Quinickicutt and Apaum,
or Plymouth, we do now freely give unto him all the land from those
rivers reaching to Pawtuxet River, as also the grass and meadows upon
the said Pawtuxet River. In witness whereof we have hereunto set our
hands.

In the presence of

The Mark * of Setash,
The Mark * of Assotenewit,
The Mark * of Caunaunicus,
The Mark * of Meauntunomo.

This original deed is preserved, as a precious relic, in the City Hall
at Providence.

[Illustration: Williams’ Letter of Transference to His Loving Friends]

EARLY EXPERIENCES IN PROVIDENCE

The Providence planters soon built their crude homes. The Indian
name of the plantation was Notaquonchanet. In their early records of
Providence this name is spelt in at least forty-two different forms.
Other settlers came and swelled their numbers. The original six were
bound together by a compact. It was verbal, or if written, the copy has
been lost. When new settlers came and Wickes and Angell had reached
majority, a copy of the original agreement was drawn up and signed by
those not included in the first compact. Williams was familiar with the
great compact signed in the Mayflower by the Pilgrims and probably it
suggested to his mind the need of one in Providence. This Providence
Compact is as follows:

We, whose names are hereunder written, being desirous to inhabit in
the town of Providence, do promise to submit ourselves in active or
passive obedience, to all such orders or agreements as shall be made
for the public good of the body, in an orderly way, by the major
consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated
together into a township, and such others whom they shall admit unto
the same, ONLY IN CIVIL THINGS.

Edmund J. Carpenter says of this Compact:

A compact of government, which in its terms, must be regarded as
the most remarkable political document theretofore executed, not
even excepting the Magna Charta. It was a document which placed a
government, formed by the people, solely in the control of the civil
arm. It gave the first example of a pure democracy, from which all
ecclesiastical power was eliminated. It was the first enunciation
of a great principle, which years later, formed the corner-stone of
the great republic. It was the act of a statesman fully a century in
advance of his time.

At the west entrance to the street railroad tunnel in Providence a
bronze tablet commemorates the fact that there in the open air the
first town meetings were held.

Roger Williams’ house was opposite the spring, forty-eight feet to the
east of the present Main Street and four feet north of Howland Street.
Next, to the north of his residence, was the house and lot of Joshua
Verein. North of this was Richard Scott’s. The first house south of
Williams’ was that of John Throckmorton and, beyond, that of William
Harris. At first the struggle for existence was hard, more so because
of the loss of the crops planted at Seekonk. Governor Winslow, of
Plymouth, conscious of the wrong Plymouth Colony had done to Williams,
visited the little settlement that first summer and left a gift of gold
with Mrs. Williams. In the spring and summer of the following year, new
houses were built along the street. The new settlers brought money with
them, and Williams enlisted outside capital to help develop the colony.

[Illustration: The Original Providence “Compact”]

Drawn up by the men of Providence, August 20, 1638, and now contained
in the City Hall. One of the most valuable documents in existence,
under which Williams and his companions promised to subject themselves
in active and passive obedience, but “Only in Civil Things.”

“You must look to the Magna Charta, for another such epoch-making
decree, for these, with the Declaration and the Emancipation
Proclamation, are the four great dynamic forces of American
Freedom.”--R. B. BURCHARD.

Courtesy of “Providence Magazine,” October, 1915

The number of town lots increased. The land lay between the present
Main Street and Hope Street. Each lot was of equal width and ran
eastward. Eventually there were one hundred and two of these lots
extending from Mile End Brook, which enters the river a little north
of Fox Point, to Harrington’s Lane, now the dividing line between
Providence and North Providence. Meeting and Power Streets were the
dividing streets in those early days. In addition to the home lot, each
proprietor had an “out six-acre lot” assigned to him. Williams’ “out
lot” was at “What Cheer Rock.”

THE THREATENED INDIAN TROUBLE

Williams, although suffering from Puritan persecution, had an
opportunity that first year of doing good to his persecutors. He became
the savior of all the New England Colonies. The Pequot Indians planned
the annihilation of the English. Williams, hearing of this, did his
utmost to break up an Indian league, and kept the Narragansetts from
joining the Pequots and Mohicans. He describes this experience in the
following statement:

The Lord helped me immediately to put my life into my hands, and
scarce acquainting my wife, to ship alone, in a poor canoe, and to
cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of
life, to the sachem’s house. Three days and nights my business forced
me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequod ambassadors, whose hands
and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered
and massacred by them on the Connecticut River, and from whom I could
not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also.
God wondrously preserved me, and helped me to break the Pequod’s
negotiation and design; and to make and finish, by many travels and
charges, the English league with the Narragansetts and Mohegans
against the Pequods.

As a result of this, the tribe of Pequots was obliterated completely
and a danger hanging over all the colonies was removed.

The Indian villages of southern New England were composed at times of
as many as fifty houses or wigwams. Most of these wigwams were shaped
like the half of an orange, with the flat or cut surface down. They
were ten to twelve feet in diameter and could accommodate two families.
Other houses were like the half of a stovepipe cut lengthwise, twenty
to thirty feet long, and accommodated from two families in the
summertime to fifty in the winter, when the people crowded together
for the sake of warmth. The council-chamber was often as long as
one hundred feet with a width of thirty feet. It was used only for
councils. A fortified stockade in the center of the village was made
of logs set into the ground. Such was the shelter afforded Williams
when he fled from Salem, and such was the place when he met the Indian
sachems in council seeking to avert the massacre of the whites. In
these villages he preached the everlasting gospel of the Son of God.
He had the constant confidence of Indian sachems because he applied to
them the principle of soul-liberty which he sought to practise among
the whites.

In the autumn of 1638, Roger Williams’ third child and first son was
born and named “Providence.” He was the first white male child born
in this colony. In the year 1639-1640 the town grew and felt the need
of a system of town government. On July 23, 1640, an organization was
decided upon in which they vested the care of the general interests of
the town in five “disposers” or arbitrators. The people retained the
right to appeal from the “disposers” to the general town meeting. They
were careful to provide that as “formerly hath been the liberties of
the town, so still to hold for the liberty of conscience.”

In 1638 a settlement had been made at Portsmouth on Rhode Island.
John Clarke and Mrs. Ann Hutchinson were the leaders of this new band
who were looking for a place where they might have religious freedom,
which was denied them at Boston. They went first to New Hampshire,
but, finding it too cold there, turned to the south. By the friendly
assistance of Mr. Williams, they secured from Canonicus and Miantonomo,
for a consideration of forty fathoms of white beads, Aquidneck and
other islands in Narragansett Bay. The natives residing on the island
itself were induced to remove for a consideration of ten coats and
twenty hoes. The new settlers chose Mr. Coddington to be their judge
and united in a covenant with each other and with their God. They made
Mr. Coddington their governor in 1640.

[Illustration: PLAN SHOWING THE FIRST DIVISION OF HOME LOTS IN
Providence, R.I.]

About this same time a number of Providence people settled in Pawtuxet,
four miles south of Providence in territory ceded to Williams. Warwick
and Shawomet were settled by Samuel Gorton and his friends. Gorton
was a strange character who did not find things congenial for him at
Boston, Plymouth, and Newport in turn. Roger Williams, however, gave
him shelter in Providence. Finally he went to Pawtuxet and later to
Shawomet, for which he paid four fathoms of wampum to the Indians. At
once Boston Colony claimed that Shawomet was under their jurisdiction.
Gorton and his associates refused to come to Boston at the bidding of
the authorities. Forty soldiers came to Shawomet and seized Gorton and
ten of his friends and imprisoned them in Boston. They were tried for
their lives, escaping only by two votes. They were then imprisoned in
the various towns. Each one was compelled to wear a chain fast bolted
around his legs. If they spoke to any person, other than an officer of
the Church or of the State, they were to be put to death. They were
kept at labor that winter and then banished in the spring. Gorton
escaped to England and secured an order from the Earl of Warwick and
the Commissioners of the Colonies requiring Massachusetts not to molest
the settlers at Shawomet. Thereafter Gorton and his friends occupied
their lands in peace.

Gorton wrote his side of the question in “Simplicities Defence,” in
which he referred to his persecutors as “That Servant so Imperious in
his Master’s Absence Revived.” This is another indictment against the
persecuting Puritans by one who found shelter in the Baptist colony of
Rhode Island.

[Illustration]

_SIMPLICITIES DEFENCE_

against

SEVEN-HEADED POLICY.

Innocency Vindicated, being unjustly Accused,

and sorely Censured, by that

_Seven-headed Church-Government_

United in

NEW-ENGLAND:

That Servant so Imperious in his Masters Absence

Revived, and now thus re-acting in NEW-ENGLAND.

The combate of the United Colonies, not onely against some of the
Natives and Subjects, but against the Authority also of the Kingdme of
_England_, with their execution of Laws, in the name and Authority of
the servant, (or of themselves) and not in the Name and Authority of
the Lord, or fountain of the Government.

Wherein is declared an Act of a great people and Country of the
_Indians_ in those parts, both Princes and People (unanimously) in
their voluntary Submission and Subjection unto the Protection and
Government of Old England (from the Fame they hear thereof) together
with the true manner and forme of it, as it appears under their own
hands and seals, being stirred up, and provoked thereto, by the
Combate and courses above-said.

Throughout which Treatise is secretly intermingled, that great
Opposition, which is in the goings forth of those two grand Spirits,
that are and ever have been, extant in the World (through the sons of
men) from the beginning and foundation thereof.

_Imprimatur, Aug. 3ᵈ. 1646._ Diligently perused, approved, and
Licensed to the Presse, according to Order by publike Authority.

_LONDON_,

Printed by _John Macock_, and are to be sold by LUKE FAVVNE, at his
shop in _Pauls Church-yard_, at the sign of the _Parrot_. 1646.

THE STORY OF THE FIRST CHARTER

As the colony grew, it was found necessary that there should be some
vested authority which would command respect from the neighbors.
Notwithstanding what Williams had done for the Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay colonies in connection with the Pequot War, and the
personal friendships he had with the governors, they would not consider
that he or his had any separate colony rights whatever. He had been
their Joseph driven from home and country by hostile brethren. In
exile, he became the savior of his brethren from a dreadful massacre
by the Indians. Nevertheless, Plymouth claimed jurisdiction over all
the plantations in Narragansett Bay, and Massachusetts claimed it over
Providence, Pawtuxet, and Shawomet. The Dutch had formed a trading-post
at Dutch Island and elsewhere and could strike a blow at the colony
at any time. Out of these conditions grew the demand for a charter.
Roger Williams, at a great personal sacrifice, went to England from
Manhattan, now New York City, because the two colonies to the north
forbade his departure from their ports.

Arriving in England, he found the country in the midst of the great
Civil War. King Charles was powerless because Parliament controlled the
realm. Parliament had placed colonial interest in charge of a committee
of which the Earl of Warwick was chairman or “Governor in Chief, and
Lord High Admiral of the Colonies.” From this council a charter was
granted, March 17, 1644. The colony was incorporated as “Providence
Plantations” and embraced the territory now covered by the State of
Rhode Island. There was granted to the inhabitants of Providence,
Portsmouth, and Newport, a

free and absolute charter of incorporation ... together with full
power and authority to govern themselves and such others as shall
hereafter inhabit within any part of said tract of land by such form
of civil government as by the voluntary consent of all or the greatest
part of them shall be found most serviceable to their estate and
condition, etc.

Upon the return of Williams, the inhabitants of Providence, learning of
his approach, came out in fourteen canoes to meet him at the Seekonk.
They traveled over the historic course which he had traveled six years
before when he was an exile. Now in triumph they escorted their beloved
leader to home and native town. A picture of his return with the
charter, by Grant, is on the walls of the Court House at Providence.

[Illustration: The Arrival of Roger Williams with the Charter]

The earliest published work of Mr. Williams is entitled,

A KEY INTO THE LANGUAGE OF AMERICA: or, an help to the Language of
the Natives in that part of America, called New-England. Together,
with briefe Observations of the Customes, Manners and Worships, etc.
of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On
all which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular
by the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions) to all
the English Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant and profitable to
the view of all men: By Roger Williams of Providence in New-England.
London, Printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643.

It was written at sea, en route to England, in the summer of 1643.
Copies of the original edition are in the Bodleian Library, at
Oxford, the British Museum, also in the Library of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, Harvard College, Brown University, and the American
Antiquarian Society at Worcester. It comprises two hundred and sixteen
small duodecimo pages, including preface and table.

The second published work of Roger Williams is entitled, “Mr. Cottons
Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered. By Roger Williams of
Providence, in New-England. London, Imprinted in the Yeere 1644.” Mr.
Cotton had sought to “take off the edge of Censure from himself”--that
he was no procurer of the sorrow which came to Williams in his flight
and exile. It is a small quarto of forty-seven pages, preceded by
an address of two pages. The letter referred to was written by John
Cotton, and was published in London, 1643. The author vindicated the
act of the magistrates in banishing Roger Williams from Massachusetts.
He denies that he himself had any agency in it. It consists of thirteen
small quarto pages. Good copies of both the Letter and the reply are
in the Library of Brown University. Two copies of the reply are in
England, one in the British Museum, the other in Bodleian Library. A
mutilated copy of the reply is also in the Library of Yale College.

Roger Williams wrote also, when in England, securing the Charter for
Rhode Island, a work entitled, “The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution for
cause of Conscience, discussed.” It is considered the best written of
all his works. These discussions were prepared in London,

for publike view, in charge of roomes and corners, yea, sometimes in
variety of strange houses, sometimes in the fields, in the midst of
travel, where he hath been forced to gather and scatter his loose
thoughts and papers.

It is written in an animated style and has the adornment of beautiful
imagery. Original copies are rare, eight only are known to exist, one
in the British Museum, one in Bodleian Library, one in Brown University
Library, one in Harvard College Library.

[Illustration]

Mʳ Cottons

LETTER

Lately Printed,

EXAMINED

AND

ANSVVERED:

By _Roger Williams_ of _Providence_
In
_New·England_.

[Illustration]

LONDON,
Imprinted in the yeere 1644.

[Illustration]

THE

BLOVDY TENENT,

of PERSECUTION, for cause of
CONSCIENCE, discussed, in

_A_ Conference _betweene_
TRVTH and PEACE.

WHO,

In all tender Affection, present to the High
Court of _Parliament_, (as the _Result_ of
their _Discourse_) these, (amongst other
_Passages_) of _highest consideration_.

[Illustration]

Printed in the Year 1644.

This work is based on a Baptist publication, entitled “An Humble
Supplication to the King’s Majesty, as it was presented 1620.” This
latter was a clear and concise argument against persecution and
for liberty of conscience. It was written by Murton, or some other
London Baptist, who was imprisoned in Newgate for conscience sake.
His confinement was so rigid that he was denied pen, paper, and ink.
A friend in London sent him sheets of paper, as stoppers for the
bottles containing his daily allowance of milk. He wrote his thoughts
on these sheets with milk, returning them to his friends as stoppers
for the empty bottles. They were held to the fire and thus became
legible. Roger Williams based his book on the argument of this “Humble
Supplication.”

[Illustration: Roger Williams’ Reference to “An Humble Supplication”
in His “Bloudy Tenent”]

In such Paper written with _Milk_ nothing will appeare, but the way
of reading it by _fire_ being knowne to this _friend_ who received
the Papers, he transcribed and kept together the Papers, although
the _Author_ himselfe could not correct, nor view what himselfe had
written.

It was in _milke_, tending to soule _nourishment_, even for _Babes_
and Sucklings in _Christ_.

It was in _milke_, spiritually _white_, pure and innocent, like
those _white horses_ of the _Word_ of _truth_ and _meeknesse_, and
the _white Linnen_ or _Armour_ of _rightousnesse_, in the _Army_ of
_Jesus_. _Rev._ 6. & 19.

It was in _milke_, soft, meeke, peaceable and gentle, tending both to
the _peace_ of _soules_, and the _peace_ of _States_ and Kingdomes.

[Sidenote: The Answer writ in Bloud.]

_Peace._ The _Answer_ (though I hope out of milkie pure intentions) is
returned in _bloud_: _bloudy_ & slaughterous _conclusions_; _bloudy_
to the _souls_ of all men, forc’d to the _Religion_ and _Worship_
which every civil State or Common-weale agrees on, and compells all
subjects to in a dissembled _uniformitie_.

Bloudy to the _bodies_, first of the holy _witnesses_ of _Christ
Jesus_, who testifie against such invented worships.

Secondly, of the _Nations_ and Peoples slaughtering each other for
their severall respective Religions and Consciences.

* * * * *

The little band which settled Providence on that June day, 1636,
had grown into a large town. With other towns they suffered the
same injustice from neighboring colonies. The assembly in Newport,
September 19, 1642, which intrusted the work of securing a charter to
Williams, was in reality fusing together these separate groups, which
had a common enemy and common principles, into a State. The Town of
Providence, a great monument to Roger Williams, must now give way to
the State of Rhode Island, which was destined to become a still larger
monument to the ideals of this great exponent of civil and religious
liberty, “a liberty which does not permit license in civil matters in
contempt of law and order.”

III

THE HISTORIC CUSTODIANS OF SOUL-LIBERTY

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

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

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

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

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

THE HISTORIC CUSTODIANS OF SOUL-LIBERTY

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

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

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

REVEREND AND DEARLY BELOVED IN THE LORD:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

Christenings

make not

CHRISTIANS,

A Briefe Discourse concerning that
name _Heathen_, commonly given to
the INDIANS.

_As also concerning that great point of their
CONVERSION._

[Illustration]

_Published according to Order._

_London_, Printed by _Iane Coe_, for I. H. 1645.

THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: First Baptist Church of Providence]

[Illustration: Roger Mowry’s “Ordinarie.” Built 1653, Demolished 1900]

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

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

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

ROGER WILLIAMS’ IDEAL, A DISTINCTIVE BAPTIST PRINCIPLE

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

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

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

[Illustration: Interior of First Baptist Church, Providence]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Bell of First Baptist Church, Providence]

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Mason says:

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

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

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

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

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

SOUL-LIBERTY AT HOME IN A COMMONWEALTH

It is his unique title to preeminence and fame that he was the first
to found an absolutely free church in an absolutely free State, and
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations remain a monument of his
sagacity and daring and penetration, a center from which the light of
soul-liberty has radiated far and wide till it has flooded a whole
continent, and shines with concentrated splendor in the constellation
of States which now form the great Western Republic.--_J. Gregory, a
British writer on Puritanism._

Against the somber background of early New England, two figures
stand above the rest--John Winthrop and Roger Williams. The
first--astute, reactionary, stern--represented Moses and the law. The
second--spontaneous, adaptable, forgiving--represented Christ and the
individual. It is needless to say with which lay the promise and the
dawn.--_I. B. Richman._

He was the first man in modern Christendom to establish civil
government on the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality
of opinions before the law, and in its defence he was the harbinger
of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor.... Let
then the name of Roger Williams be preserved in universal history
as one who advanced moral and political science, and made himself a
benefactor of his race.--_George Bancroft, in “History of the United
States.”_

In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for
such a John the Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams.
He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like
Cotton, or the political 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.--_Edward Eggleston, in “The
Beginners of a Nation.”_

SOUL-LIBERTY AT HOME IN A COMMONWEALTH

Portsmouth, Newport, and Rhode Island, with common interests and
ideals, were protected and throve under the original charter granted in
1644. Charles I was surrendered to the Parliamentary forces in January,
1647. The colony, therefore, felt strong to act under the Parliamentary
charter granted them. A general assembly of the people was called,
and the charter was adopted. Shawomet, settled by the Gortonists, had
also received a charter from the same source and, in honor of Warwick,
their protector, they changed the name of their town to Warwick.
They were admitted also to the General Assembly. The first meeting
of the Assembly declared that the form of government in Providence
Plantations was “democratical,” that is to say, “government held by
the free and voluntary consent of all or of the greater part of the
free inhabitants.” The seal of the colony was an anchor. The executive
branch of the government was vested in a president of the colony and
four assistants, one from each town. These officers, elected by the
General Assembly, had no part in legislation. The Assembly at that time
was not composed of delegates, but included all the freemen of the
colony. Each town had a court of commissioners composed of six members.
These four town courts combined became a General Court of Trials,
having to do with the weightier offenses, and also acted as a Court of
Appeals from the town courts. There was also a general treasurer, a
general recorder, a general sergeant, and later a general solicitor.

A code of laws was drawn up. One, the Statute of Archery, shows the
isolation of this colony. It required that every man between seventeen
and seventy should keep a bow and four arrows. Fathers should furnish
each of their sons, between the ages of seven and seventeen, with “a
bow, two arrows, and a shaft, and to bring them up to shooting.” This
was done because the colony could not get gunpowder for firearms,
since the other colonies refused to sell them any, or allow it to be
exported through their posts to them.

[Illustration]

The Fourth Paper,

Presented by

Maior Butler,

To the Honourable Committee of
Parliament, for the Propagating the
Gospel of _Christ_ JESUS.

VVhich Paper was humbly owned, and
was, and is attended to be made good

{ Major _Butler_. } { Mr. _Jackson_.
By { Mr. _Charles Vane_. } { Mr. _VVall_. And
{ Col. _Danvers_. } { Mr. _Turner_.

ALSO

A Letter from Mr. _Goad_, to Major
BUTLER, upon occasion of the said
PAPER and PROPOSALS.

_Together with_

A Testimony to the said fourth Paper,
By way or Explanation upon the four
PROPOSALS of it.

_BY_ R. W.

Unto which is subjoyned the Fifteen Proposals
of the MINISTERS.

_London_, Printed for _Giles Calvert_, at the Black-spred-Eagle at the
West-end of _Pauls_. _M DC LII._

ROGER WILLIAMS’ SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND

The ambitious designs of Coddington in seeking to divide the colony
were such that Williams and Clarke were obliged to go to England in
1651. Coddington had secured a charter making him governor for life
of Rhode Island, then the richest portion of the State. Williams and
Clarke in 1652 secured an order-in-council nullifying Coddington’s
commission. Williams remained in England until the summer of 1654 and
labored there for the interests of the colony and also for the general
benefit of all oppressed people, including the Jews. In his appeal to
the Parliament, found as a comment in the tract entitled “Butler’s
Fourth Paper,” an original copy of which is in the John Carter Brown
Library, at Providence, he says:

Oh, that it would please the Father of Spirits to affect the heart
of Parliament with such a merciful sense of the Soul-Bars and Yokes
which our fathers have laid upon the neck of this nation, and at last
to proclaim a true and absolute Soul-Freedom to all the people of
the land impartially, so that no person be forced to pray nor pay,
otherwise than as his Soul believeth and consenteth.

He plead especially that permission be granted the Jews “to live freely
and peaceably amongst them.”

He was on intimate terms with Milton, to whom he read and from whom he
received instruction in certain languages. He also was associated with
Sir Henry Vane. Returning to his colony in 1654, he at once exercised
his influence in smoothing out its many and varied difficulties.

During this second visit to England he issued three publications. John
Cotton had written a reply to the “Bloody Tenent,” publishing it in
London, in 1647. It had the following title:

The Bloudy Tenent, washed, and made white in the bloud of the Lambe:
being discussed and discharged of bloud-guiltinesse by just Defence.

Roger Williams in 1652 printed his rejoinder to Cotton’s book. Its
title is descriptive of its contents:

The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody: by Mr Cottons endevour to wash
it white in the Blood of the Lambe; of whose precious Blood, spilt
in the Blood of his Servants; and of the blood of Millions spilt in
former and later Wars for Conscience sake, that Most Bloody Tenent of
Persecution for cause of Conscience, upon a second Tryal, is found now
more apparently and more notoriously guilty, etc., etc. By R. Williams
of Providence in New-England. London, Printed for Giles Calvert, and
are to be sold at the black-spread-Eagle, at the West-end of Pauls,
1652.

It is a small quarto of three hundred and seventy-three pages. Two
copies are in the Library of Brown University, one, a presentation copy
from Williams to his friend, Dr. John Clarke, of Newport.

[Illustration]

THE

BLOUDY TENENT,

_WASHED_,

And made white in the bloud of the
Lambe: being discussed and discharged of
bloud-guiltinesse by just Defence.

WHEREIN

The great Questions of this present time are
handled, _viz._ How farre Liberty of Conscience
ought to be given to those that truly feare God? And how farre
restrained to turbulent and pestilent persons, that not onely
raze the foundation of Godlinesse, but disturb the Civill
Peace where they live? Also how farre the Magistrate may proceed
in the duties of the first Table? And that all Magistrates
ought to study the word and will of God, that they may frame
their Government according to it.

DISCUSSED.

As they are alledged from divers Scriptures, out of
the Old and New Testament. Wherein also the practise of
Princes is debated, together with the Judgement of Ancient
and late Writers of most precious esteeme.

_Whereunto is added a Reply to Mr._ WILLIAMS
Answer, to Mr. COTTONS Letter.

_BY_ JOHN COTTON Batchelor in Divinity, and
Teacher of the Church of Christ at _Boston_ in _New-England_.

_LONDON_,
Printed by _Matthew Symmons_ for _Hannah Allen_, at the _Crowne_ in
_Popes-Head_-Alley. 1647.

[Illustration]

THE

BLOODY TENENT

YET

More Bloody:

Mr _Cottons_ endevour to wash it white in the
BLOOD of the _LAMBE_;

Of whose precious Blood, spilt in the
Blood of his Servants; and

Of the blood of Millions spilt in former and
later Wars for Conscience sake,

THAT

Most Bloody Tenent of Persecution for cause of
Conscience, upon a second Tryal, is found now more
apparently and more notoriously guilty.

In this Rejoynder to Mr _Cotton_, are principally

I. _The Nature of Persecution_, }
} Examined;
II. _The Power of the Civill Sword }
in Spirituals_ }

III. _The Parliaments permission of_ } Justified.
_Dissenting Consciences_ }

Also (as a Testimony to Mʳ _Clarks_ Narrative) is added
a Letter to Mr _Endicot_ Governor of the _Massachusets_ in _N. E._

By R. WILLIAMS of _Providence_ in _New-England_.

_London_, Printed for _Giles Calvert_, and are to be sold at
the black-spread-Eagle at the West-end of _Pauls_, 1652.

Roger Williams published his fifth work in 1652. It was a pamphlet of
forty-four small quarto pages, entitled:

The Hireling Ministry None of Christs, or A Discourse touching the
Propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus. Humbly Presented to such Pious
and Honourable Hands, whom the present Debate thereof concerns. By
Roger Williams, of Providence, in New England. London Printed in the
second Moneth, 1652.

The purpose of this work was to oppose a legal establishment of
religion, and the compulsory support of the clergy. An original copy
is in the Library of Brown University, two copies are in the American
Antiquarian Society Library at Worcester, and one in the John Carter
Brown Library, Providence, R. I.

The same year he issued a pamphlet entitled:

Experiments of Spiritual Life & Health, And their Preservatives, In
which the weakest Child of God may get Assurance of his Spirituall
Life and Blessednesse, and the Strongest may finde proportionable
Discoveries of his Christian Growth, and the means of it. By Roger
Williams of Providence in New-England. London, Printed, in the Second
Month, 1652.

This book is in the form of a letter addressed to his wife, upon her
recovery from a dangerous sickness. A limited edition was published,
comprising sixty small quarto pages. For years no original copy has
been found. There is an original copy now in the John Carter Brown
Library at Providence, R. I.

[Illustration]

The

Hireling Ministry

_None of_

CHRISTS,

A Discourse touching the Propagating
the Gospel of CHRIST
JESUS.

_Humbly Presented to such Pious
and Honourable Hands, whom
the present Debate thereof concerns._

_By_ ROGER WILLIAMS, _of_ Providence
in New England.

_London_ Printed in the second
Moneth, 1652.

[Illustration]

EXPERIMENTS

Spiritual Life & Health,

And their

PRESERVATIVES

In which the _Weakest_ Child of _God_ may
get _Assurance_ of his Spirituall _Life_
and _Blessednesse_

And the _Strongest_ may finde proportionable _Discoveries_
of his _Christian Growth_, and the _means_ of it.

By _Roger Williams_ of _Providence_ in
_New-England_.

[Illustration]

London, Printed, in the Second Month,
1652.

From time to time local difficulties arose in the various towns.
Ambitious men, seeking their personal welfare, rather than the
public weal, disturbed the serenity of the colony. Certain settlers
at Pawtuxet sought to be part of the Bay Colony; Coddington, at
Newport, desired to be governor for life of the Islands of Rhode Island
and Conanicut. Two rival assemblies were organized at Newport and
Providence. Roger Williams used his influence and greatly helped to
solve the vexing problems. A new colony, with a new and revolutionary
ideal, was being born, and the birth-throes were great, owing to the
fact that they were pioneers in this work of building a democracy.
They had no illustrious precedent to follow. It is a marvel that their
difficulties were not more and greater.

In 1656, the United Colonies urged the Providence Colony to banish all
Quakers from their realm. They replied that “_FREEDOM of Conscience is
the ground of our charter, and it shall be maintained_.” In 1658, the
United Colonies threatened the Providence Colony with exclusion from
all intercourse or trade with all the rest of the colonies, if they did
not banish the Quakers. Meanwhile the Bay Colony was unrelenting in its
persecution of the Quakers. Some were banished, and a few were put to
death.

In September, 1658, Cromwell died. His son Richard succeeded him,
and after a short time retired. Charles II ascended the English
throne in June, 1660. Immediately all acts of the Parliament under
Cromwell were repealed, and Providence Plantations lost its charter.
The Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies immediately asserted
anew their claims for the territory about the Narragansett Bay. Dr.
John Clarke, of Newport, was in England representing the claims of
the Providence Colony, and, in 1663, secured for it a new royal
charter. The old Colony of Providence Plantations ceased to exist.
The new colony was called “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
The charter defined the bounds of the colony, gave it freedom in all
religious matters, a system of government, a power to organize courts
and to enforce their decisions, power to raise a standing army of
defense, and other essential things. The new seal of the colony was
“Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” with an anchor and the word,
“Hope,” above it.

[Illustration]

George Fox

Digg’d out of his

Burrovves,

Or an Offer of

DISPUTATION

On fourteen _Proposalls_ made this last Summer 1672 (so call’d)
unto _G. Fox_ then present on _Rode-Island_
in _New-England_, by _R.W._

As also how (_G. Fox_ slily departing) the Disputation went on
being managed three dayes at _Newport_ on _Rode-Island_, and
one day at _Providence_, between _John Stubs, John Burnet, and
William Edmundson_ on the one part, and _R.W._ on the other.

In which many _Quotations_ out of _G. Fox_ & _Ed. Barrowes_ Book
in _Folio_ are alleadged.

WITH AN

APENDIX

Of some scores of _G. F._ his simple lame Answers to his Opposites
in that Book, quoted and replyed to
By R. W. of _Providence_ in N.E.
_Roger Williams_

BOSTON
Printed by _John Foster_, 1676.

[Illustration: Models of Indian Village in Roger Williams Park Museum
Courtesy of “Providence Magazine”]

The Model of a Southern New England Indian Village

Oval House of Birch Bark and Mats Corn-field

Women Smoking Fish

Round House of Grass Long Council Chamber Making a Long House

Indian Men Feeding Dogs

Roger Williams protected the Quakers by granting them in his colony a
shelter from persecutions. However, he was never friendly to their
peculiar tenets and assailed them in debates and pamphlets. When George
Fox, their founder, was in America in 1672, Williams challenged him
to a debate. A delay in getting the challenge to Fox, who had sailed
for England, did not leave the debate unaccepted. Three Rhode Island
Quakers undertook the task. Roger Williams rowed the thirty miles
to Newport and for three days debated with all the characteristic
bitterness of debates of that period. They adjourned to complete the
debate at Providence. Williams is seen in the worst light here and has
been greatly criticized for the strong language he used in opposing
these Quakers. We should never forget that the Puritans went far beyond
strong language, in persecuting some to death and in exiling others.
Both sides claimed a victory in the debate, which was perpetuated in
pamphlets, issued at its completion. Williams wrote one, entitled,
“George Fox Digg’d out of his Burrowes.” Fox replied with one,
entitled, “A New-England Fire-Brand Quenched.” Fox’s book is a quarto
of 489 pages. Williams’ book, a small quarto of 327 pages, was printed
in Boston, 1676. The only original copy known to exist is the one in
the Library of Harvard College.

Roger Williams wrote many letters, the originals of which were widely
scattered. Many of these have been collected and printed in a volume
by the Rhode Island Historical Society. In one of these letters, to
Governor Bradford, of Boston, he refers to a collection of discourses
which he had reduced to writing. These sermons, with treatises written
prior to his banishment, are probably lost forever.

KING PHILIP’S WAR

Canonicus died, June 4, 1647. Massasoit died in 1660, leaving two
sons, Wamsutta and Metacon, or as they were nicknamed by the English,
Alexander and Philip. The former succeeded his father. On a return from
Plymouth Alexander died suddenly, and Philip suspected that he was
poisoned. This, however, was not the fact. The Narragansetts had not
forgotten the death or murder of Miantonomo, and the Indians generally
felt that the English were gradually crowding them out of their own
domains. Philip took advantage of this feeling and organized a war
which had for its object the complete extermination of all the
English settlements. This war, opening in Plymouth, 1675, lasted more
than a year. Twelve out of the ninety New England towns were completely
destroyed and forty others were the scene of fire and slaughter. A
thousand strong men lost their lives in addition to a large number of
helpless women and children who were tomahawked. Rhode Island, for the
first time, was exposed to the hostile attacks of the Indians. Many of
the inhabitants, fearing the impending disaster, had joined the army
of attack against the Indians. In retaliation for this, Providence was
attacked, and twenty-nine houses were burned. One of them contained the
town records, part of which were saved by being thrown into a pond,
from which they were afterward recovered. When the Indians appeared
on the heights above Providence, Roger Williams, unarmed, went out to
counsel with them. He urged them to stop the warfare, telling them that
the English king would come to the assistance of the colonists and,
with greater numbers, overpower the Indians. They replied:

Let them come, we are ready for them. But as for you, Brother
Williams, you are a good man, you have been kind to us many years, not
a hair of your head shall be touched.

He returned to a house which had been converted into a fort. It was not
touched, but the town otherwise was destroyed. Most of the citizens of
the mainland fled to Rhode Island and Newport. The doom of the Indians
was sounded, the war was put down, and the leaders were captured or
slain. Immediately after the war the work of rebuilding commenced.
Houses were built larger and more substantially.

[Illustration]

A _NEW-ENGLAND_-

Fire-Brand Quenched,

Being an

ANSWER

UNTO A

Slanderous Book, Entituled; _GEORGE FOX
Digged out of his Burrows_, &c. Printed at _Boston_ in the Year
1676, by _Roger Williams_ of _Providence_ in _New-England_.

Which he _Dedicateth_ to the _KING_, with Desires, _That, if_
the Most-High _please_, Old _and_ New-England _may Flourish, when
the_ Pope & Mahomet, Rome & Constantinople _are in their Ashes_.

Of a _DISPUTE_ upon XIV. of his _Proposals_ held and debated
betwixt him, the said _Roger Williams_, on the one part, and
_John Stubs_, _William Edmundson_ and _John Burnyeat_ on the other.
At _Providence_ and _Newport_ in _Rode-Island_, in the Year 1672.
IN which his _Cavils_ are Refuted, & his _Reflections_ Reproved.

In Two Parts.

AS ALSO,

An _ANSWER_ to _R. W’s APPENDIX_, &c.

WITH A

_POST-SCRIPT_ Confuting his Blasphemous Assertions,
_viz._ _Of the Blood of_ Christ, _that was Shed, its being_
Corruptible _and_ Corrupted; _and that_ Salvation _was by a Man,
that was_ Corruptible,
&_c._ Where-unto is added a

_CATALOGUE_ of his _Railery_, _Lies_, _Scorn_ & _Blasphemies_: And
His _TEMPORIZING SPIRIT_ made manifest. Also, The
_LETTERS_ of _W. Coddington_ of _Rode-Island_, and _R. Scot_ of
_Providence_ in _New-England_ concerning _R.W._ And _Lastly_, Some
_TESTIMONIES_ of _Antient_ & _Modern Authors_ concerning
the _LIGHT_, _SCRIPTURES_, _RULE_ &, the _SOUL_ of _Man_.

By _GEORGE FOX_ and _JOHN BURNYEAT_.

Printed in the Year MDC. LXXIX.

[Illustration: Rhode Island Historical Society Museum]

[Illustration: Apple Tree Root from the Grave of Roger Williams]

[Illustration: Grave of Roger Williams]

Roger Williams for many years had a trading-place, where he did
business with the Indians. This store was near the present village of
Wickford. His profits, he tells us, were five hundred dollars a year.
The foundations of this old building are still intact, with a new
superstructure over them. Late in life he made monthly preaching visits
to this place. When too old to do this, he planned the publication of
his sermons for the natives. Roger Williams was the original missionary
to the North American Indians, antedating the illustrious Eliot by
thirteen years. Williams’ Indian Bible is in the John Hay Library,
Providence, R. I.

[Illustration: New Testament Title-page of Roger Williams’ Indian Bible]

WUSKU

WUTTESTAMENTUM

NULLORDUMUN

JESUS CHRIST

Nuppoquohwussuaeneumun.

[Illustration]

_CAMBRIDGE_:

Printed by _Samuel Green_ and _Marmaduke Johnson_,

MDCLXI.

[Illustration: Indian Bible Used by Roger Williams, the Pioneer
Missionary to the American Indians]

THE

HOLY BIBLE:

CONTAINING THE

OLD TESTAMENT

AND THE _NEW_.

Translated into the

INDIAN LANGUAGE

_AND_

Ordered to be Printed by Commissioners of the _United Colonies_
in _NEW-ENGLAND_,

At the Charge, and with the Consent of the

CORPORATION IN _ENGLAND_

_For the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the_ Indians
_in New_-England.

_CAMBRIDGE._

Printed by _Samuel Green_ and _Marmaduke Johnson_.

MDCLXIII.

In 1683, Roger Williams died. All the inhabitants of Providence turned
out to honor his memory. The coffin was carried on the shoulders of his
friends, and his earthly remains were laid to rest on his own property,
on the slope of the hill east of his residence and the spring. An
apple tree grew above the grave. The roots drew from the remains their
nourishment and followed the shape of the skeleton and the legs. Today
these same roots are preserved in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s
collection. Reuben A. Guild describes this in the following manner:

Still further up the hill among the trees of his orchard, was the
family burial ground. Crossing Benefit Street and passing into the
rear of the house of the late Sullivan Dorr, a few feet from the
stable door, is the original grave of Roger Williams. It is covered
by a finished cap of a heavy stone pillar. Here for nearly two
hundred years slept the remains of the Apostle of Religious Liberty.
In March, 1860, the grave was opened, and the dust, for that was all
that remained of the mortal body, was carefully placed in an urn and
deposited in Mr. Randall’s family tomb in the North Burial Ground.
Mrs. Williams’ grave was also visited, and a lock of braided hair was
all that was discovered. At the bottom of Roger Williams’ grave the
root of an apple tree had turned out of its way to enter in at the
head. Following the position of the body to the thighs, it had turned,
now divided, to follow each leg to the feet, tender fibers shooting
out in various directions.

Roger Williams died a poor man. His interest in the needy and
distressed had kept him constantly poor. Ambition formed no part
of his personal life. His ambitions were for the larger group of
distressed souls. A prophet is rarely appreciated in his own age by
his contemporaries. Posterity, in later days, usually discovers the
greatness and genius of the man and the ideal he realized. Today that
ideal is the secret of America’s greatness and one that has given her
distinction among the nations. Shortly before Williams’ death there was
a discussion relative to dividing up the common lands. Williams wrote
to the Town of Providence a plea, which is characteristic of the spirit
of the man:

For all experience tells us that public peace and love is better than
abundance of corn and cattle. I have only one motion and petition
which I earnestly pray the town to lay to heart, as ever they look for
a blessing from God upon the town, on your families, your corn and
cattle, and your children after you; it is this, that after you have
got over the black brook of some soul bondage yourself, you tear not
down the bridge after you, by leaving no small pittance for distressed
souls that may come after you.

FROM SOUL-LIBERTY TO ABSOLUTE CIVIL LIBERTY

RHODE ISLAND’S GIFT

Last of the thirteen, smallest of them all,
What canst thou bring to this world’s festival,
Where all thy sisters come with pride and power,
And bring each one a princess’ generous dower
Of gold and gems, and fruits and precious woods,
And joyous tribute of their costly goods?
What can we bring? No outward show of gain,
No pomp of state; we bring the sons of men!

Bring gold, fair sisters, yellow gold,
And gems, and all that’s fair and fine,
And heap them all, the new, the old,
Before our country’s stately shrine.
Bring hardihood from north and east,
Bring beauty from the south and west,
Bring valor to adorn the feast,
Bring all that has withstood time’s test.
We grudge you not the riches rare,
We grudge you not your acres broad,
We bring you for our noble share
THE LIBERTY TO WORSHIP GOD.

--_Caroline Hazard, Poem read on “Rhode Island Day” at World’s
Columbian Exposition, Chicago, October 5, 1893._

FROM SOUL-LIBERTY TO ABSOLUTE CIVIL LIBERTY

The ideal of democracy grew in all the New England colonies and led
eventually to the American Revolution and the establishment of the
United States of America. Rhode Island, however, in the century prior
to the Revolution, had never given up her advocacy of soul-liberty, and
thus the Revolution was to her a greater struggle than to the other
colonies. This distinct feature will be seen in a study of the real
successors of Roger Williams, in the struggle for religious liberty.
Therefore it is interesting to note some of the outstanding events in
the history of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, previous to the
Revolutionary War.

In June, 1700, a lot was set aside for a training-ground, a
burial-ground, and other public uses. Thus originated the North Burial
Ground, the first public burial-ground in the colony. Before this each
family had buried on its own land. Not until 1760, when Benefit Street
was laid through the burial-grounds of many of the citizens, including
the land where Roger Williams first settled, did they come to use in a
general way this North Burial Ground. Then many bodies were removed to
the new place for burial.

The second house of worship to be erected in the colony, in 1704,
was the Friends’ Meeting House, in what is now Lincoln. It is still
standing, although with an extensive addition. The Friends’ Meeting
House in Providence was erected about the same time. The First
Congregational Church was organized in 1720, a meeting-house being
erected in 1723. It was on the site of the present county court-house.
In 1722, the Episcopalians erected their first church building. It was
called King’s Church, and was on the site of the present St. John’s
Church on North Main Street. In 1798, the Methodists organized their
first church, building their first meeting-house in 1816 at the corner
of Aborn and Washington Streets. The Roman Catholics commenced their
work in 1827, meeting in Mechanics’ Hall, afterward in the old Town
House. From the very start no discouragement was given to any church to
organize in Rhode Island. During this same period of time Baptists were
hindered in other colonies.

In 1660, the proprietors of the colony ordered the setting aside of
one hundred acres of upland and six of meadows to be reserved for the
maintenance of a school. In 1696, a piece of land on Dexter Lane,
or Stamper’s Hill, was set apart for a school. This schoolhouse was
built about the year 1697, about fifty feet north of Olney Street, on
the east side of Stamper’s Street. It was used for about fifty years.
The schoolmaster probably received all of his compensation from the
scholars. A lot on the end of the Court House Parade was left for a
school building. The first reference to a school house on this lot is
found in the town records for 1752. The town leased this schoolhouse
to a schoolmaster. In 1769, the first free school was established on
King’s Street, now Meeting Street. This building is used now as a
fresh-air school.

BROWN UNIVERSITY

As early as 1762 a movement was instituted by James Manning of Scotch
Plains, New Jersey, to establish in Rhode Island a university on the
broad basis of religious freedom, but under the special care of the
Baptists. A charter, to be presented to the General Assembly in 1763,
was prepared by Rev. Ezra Stiles, a Congregational minister at Newport.
When the document was ready for presentation, it was noticed that the
governing power was to be given to a presbyterian body. That occasioned
postponement. A charter was granted, however, in February, 1764, under
the name of “The Trustees and Fellows of the College or University in
the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New
England in America.” The corporation was given power to change its
name. It organized with James Manning as president. Active teaching
work was commenced at Warren in 1766. The founding of this university
was an event touching not only the life of Rhode Island, but of the
whole country. As a Baptist movement, it was first proposed by Morgan
Edwards in 1762, at the Philadelphia Baptist Association. James
Manning came from the little church at Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and
from a Baptist Association to the only place in America, at that time,
where a Baptist university could be established. The Baptists desired
the controlling power, but not the whole power of administration, in
order to preserve their great principle of religious freedom. According
to the original charter, twenty-two of the thirty-six trustees were
to be Baptists, five Quakers, four Congregationalists, and five
Episcopalians. Of the twelve fellows, eight were to be Baptist, the
rest indefinitely of any or all denominations. The following extract
shows the Baptist ideal:

into this liberal and catholic institution shall never be admitted
any religious tests, but, on the contrary, all the members hereof,
shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninterrupted liberty
of conscience; and that the places of professors, tutors, and all
other officers, the President alone excepted, shall be free and open
for all denominations of Protestants, and the youths of all religious
denominations shall and may be admitted to the equal advantages,
emoluments, and honors of the university; and that the sectarian
differences shall not make any part of the public and classical
instructions.

Its early history is interesting. There was but one student during
its first year, the Rev. William Rogers, of Newport, then fourteen
years old. In 1767, four new students enrolled. The first years of the
college were spent at Warren, where Dr. James Manning, the president,
was the acting pastor of a Baptist church recently organized. In
1769, the first class of seven was ready for graduation and the first
commencement was held on September 7, 1769.

The various towns of the colony contended earnestly to have the college
permanently located with them. Newport considered that her large gifts
to the college were sufficient to give her the preference. Providence,
being a stronger center for the Baptists, won, and, in 1770, the
college was moved to that city. The old brick schoolhouse, near the
foot of Meeting Street, was the first building used by the college. The
students boarded in private families at a dollar and a quarter a week.
The building committee soon selected a better location for the school
and a better place for housing the student body. Morgan Edwards said of
the site finally selected:

Commanding a prospect of the Town of Providence below, of the
Narragansett Bay and Island and of an extensive country, variegated
with hills and dales, woods and plains.... Surely this spot was made
for a seat of the Muses.

The first building, one sufficient for the needs of the college for the
following fifty years, was University Hall, modeled after Nassau Hall
of Princeton. The upper two stories were added after the Revolutionary
war. For six years, during that great struggle, the hall was used as
barracks and hospital for the combined American and French troops. In
1775, the present First Baptist Church Meeting House was erected, “for
the public worship of Almighty God and to hold commencements in.” Since
1775 until the present time, with the exceptions of the years 1804 and
1832, this church has been used for the commencement exercises. On its
platform illustrious students have received their degrees and have gone
forth to bless the world. The presidents of Brown University, seated
in the James Manning chair, have presided at the commencements in the
historic Baptist Meeting House, and have given public honor to men
who in turn have honored the university and city. George Washington
received the honorary degree of LL. D. in 1790. Among her illustrious
graduates none is greater than Adoniram Judson, our pioneer American
and Baptist foreign missionary.

Doctor Manning died in 1791, and was buried in the North Burial Ground.
The corporation voted that same year,

That the children of the Jews may be admitted into this institution
and entirely enjoy the freedom of their own religion, without any
constraint or imposition whatever.

The name of the college was changed from Rhode Island to Brown
University, in 1804, in honor of Nicholas Brown, whose liberal gifts to
the college were much appreciated. He was a trustee and in his lifetime
gave about $100,000 to the college. In 1821 the increasing number of
students made another building imperative, and Nicholas Brown gave this
needed structure, Hope College, as a gift to the institution.

[Illustration: Original Home of Brown University, in Providence, R. I.]

[Illustration: Brown University in Early Nineteenth Century]

The second president of Brown University was Jonathan Maxcy, who served
from 1792 until 1802. In these ten years two hundred and twenty-seven
were graduated, sixty-six claiming law as their profession, and
fifty-six entering the ministry. Asa Messer was the third president,
serving from 1802 until his resignation in 1826. His membership was in
the First Baptist Church, but his views, after 1815, were Unitarian.
Acts of vandalism, such as breaking into the library, beating down the
pulpit, and breaking windows, were such that he took it as a protest
against his position and finally resigned.

The next president was Francis Wayland. He completely reorganized the
University. He introduced the elective system, and offered several
practical courses. The college grounds were laid out. Two new buildings
were erected. Manning Hall, a gift of Nicholas Brown, and named
in honor of the first president, was built in 1840. In this Doric
structure the library found a home on the first floor and the chapel on
the second. Rhode Island Hall was erected shortly afterward, $10,000
being raised by Rhode Island men and women, and the balance of $12,500
being largely the gift of Nicholas Brown. Doctor Wayland’s presidency
came to an end by his death in 1855. He was buried in North Burial
Ground. Following him came Barnes Sears, Alexis Gaswell, Ezekiel Gilman
Robinson, Elisha Benjamin Andrews, and the present president, W. H. P.
Faunce, since June, 1899. Today the college has more than a thousand
students, about thirty buildings, and an endowment of more than four
million dollars. Brown University was the pioneer of the hundreds of
schools, colleges, and universities which the Baptists were destined to
have in the years that followed. These are not limited to one State,
but are scattered all over our country.

Pilgrims to Providence, the birthplace of religious liberty in America,
should not fail to visit those buildings which contain sacred relics of
the long and hard struggle for soul-liberty and political freedom in
America.

The present million-dollar CITY HALL, at the west end of Exchange
Place, in Providence, was erected in the period 1874 to 1878. In the
office of the Recorder of Deeds can be seen “the original deeds”
from the Indian chiefs to Roger Williams in 1636, also his letter
transferring to his loving friends, “a share of the new territory.” The
original Compact of Government is here also, and there is a bust of
Roger Williams over the entrance.

THE OLD STATE HOUSE, situated on Benefit Street, is a building which
can well vie with Faneuil Hall in Boston and Independence Hall in
Philadelphia as a “Cradle of Liberty.” Built in 1763, it was originally
occupied by the Rhode Island Colonial Assembly, who here on May 4,
1776, two months previous to the Declaration of Independence, in
Philadelphia, adopted the famous act renouncing allegiance to Great
Britain. This fact is commemorated by a bronze tablet and also by an
annual commemoration in all the public schools of Providence.

THE NEW STATE HOUSE, or “Marble Palace,” on the crest of Capitol Hill,
completed in 1902 at a cost of $3,200,000, is built of white Georgia
marble, and has for a distinguishing feature one of the few marble
domes existing in the world. This inscription is on the south front of
the Capitol:

To hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state
may stand and best be maintained, with full Liberty in Religious
Concernments.

On the north side, we read,

Providence Plantations, Founded by Roger Williams, 1636, Providence,
Portsmouth, Newport, incorporated by Parliament, 1643, Rhode Island,
Providence Plantations, obtained Royal Charter 1663. In General
Assembly declared a Sovereign State, May 4th, 1776.

The inscription around the interior of the dome is a Latin quotation
from Tacitus. Translated it is:

Rare felicity of the times when it is permitted to think as you like,
and say what you think.

In the State Chamber is Gilbert Stuart’s rare full-length portrait of
General Washington. In the Secretary of State’s office is the original
charter, granted in 1663, under which the colony and State were
governed until 1843. In a subbasement there is a collection of State
historical exhibits, originally collected for the Jamestown Exposition.
On the dome of the State House there is a colossal bronze statue of
“Independent Man, or the Genius of Religious Liberty,” designed by
Brewster.

[Illustration: Capitol Building in Providence, Where the Charter is
Kept]

[Illustration: City Hall, Providence, Where the Compact, Indian Deed,
and Letter of Transference are Kept]

THE COURT HOUSE is on the corner of Benefit and College Streets. In its
corridor there is a historical painting by C. F. Grant, picturing
“The return of Roger Williams with the first charter for the Colony in
1644.”

RHODE ISLAND IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

Rhode Island was the first to strike a blow for civil liberty as she
was the first in the struggle for religious liberty. She was last,
however, to adopt the Constitution of the United States. She hesitated
to surrender to the federal government the liberties enjoyed under her
charter, the most liberal ever granted to a colony. She has a right to
be proud of her record, before, during, and after the Revolutionary
war. E. Benjamin Andrews opened his case for Rhode Island’s recognition
with these words:

States are great or small according to their miles, and as the little
birth town of the Christ, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, was not
least among the princes of Judah, so Rhode Island, diminutive as she
is physically, is far from least among the princely Constituents of
this republic.

The history of Rhode Island proves that the best compatriot political
liberty ever had was absolute religious liberty.

Rhode Island was the first to strike the name of king from the charter
of her liberties, thus becoming the first sovereign independent State
in all the New World.

Rhode Island was the first to recommend the permanent establishment of
a Continental Congress, in town meeting assembled, May 17, 1774, and
in General Assembly, June 15, 1774, she appointed Samuel Ward and Ezek
Hopkins her first delegates thereto.

Rhode Island was also the first, by overt act, to renounce allegiance
to George III of England. She was first to instruct her officers to
disregard the Stamp Act and to ensure them indemnity for so doing. In
1765, she explicitly declared that in herself alone was vested the
right of local taxation.

Rhode Island was first to fire a gun against the dominion of England.
The first blood of the Revolutionary war was spilt in Narragansett
Bay. Lexington was fought April 19, 1775; the Boston Tea Party was on
December 16, 1773; Providence men, after perfecting their plans at the
Sabin Tavern, Planet and South Main Streets, rowed down the river, and
on June 10, 1772, sent up the Gaspee in flames.

On July 19, 1769, the men of Newport sunk His Majesty’s sloop, Liberty.
Rhode Island was the first to establish an American navy. She gave the
command to Abraham Whipple, who forthwith captured the first war prize
(the tender of the frigate Rose, then off Newport). After the war of
independence was under way, Rhode Island was the first to recommend
and urge upon Congress the establishment of a Continental navy.
Congress chose a Rhode Islander to work out the plans. Ezek Hopkins, a
Providence man, was appointed commander-in-chief. Three-fourths of all
the officers were from Rhode Island. These men were the vikings of the
American Revolution. Ezek Hopkins’ home is still preserved on Admiral
Street. There is a monument to him at his grave in Hopkins Square,
corner Branch Avenue and Charles Street.

In proportion to her size none of the other States can compare with
Rhode Island in the amount given to the Continental loan. Her citizens,
unlocking their purses, freely furnished the sinews of war. She
contributed seven times as much as South Carolina, whose population was
three times as large; one and a half times as much as Maryland, whose
population was four times as great; twice as much as Virginia, with a
population eight times larger.

Rhode Island contributed proportionately her share of men to the great
struggle. Rhode Island men were in every great battle under Washington.
Rhode Island has been greatly criticized for not quickly adopting the
Constitution. She was the last to adopt it. Her conception of religious
and civic liberty in combination was such that she was not willing to
lose easily the liberty which she had obtained for herself and which
she freely advocated for others. Her part in the great struggle was so
great that her motive for delay in adopting the Constitution should
never be questioned. Her ideal of liberty, unique to Rhode Island then,
is the generally accepted one now throughout America and back of every
great politicial reform in lands beyond our borders.

Ex-Governor Russell Brown, on Rhode Island Day at the World’s Columbian
Exposition, said:

The history of our State is a birthright which neither lands nor gold
can buy, for full as it is of stirring and passionate events, there
is not an incident in our annals that can bring the scarlet of shame
to the cheek of civilized man. Roger Williams the first settler, the
thrice-exiled friend of the weak and oppressed, by his revolt against
Puritan intolerance and his sacrifice for soul liberty, baptized Rhode
Island’s early days with glory sufficient for any State.

THE TORCH-BEARERS OF THE IDEAL OF ROGER WILLIAMS UNTIL LIBERTY
ENLIGHTENED THE WORLD

I believe all our Baptist ministers in town, except two, and most of
our brethren in the country were on the side of the Americans in the
late dispute.... To this hour we believe that the independence of
America will, for a while, secure the liberty of this country, but
if that continent had been reduced, Britain would not have long been
free.--_Doctor Rippon, of London, England, to President Manning, of
Rhode Island College, written in 1784._

Nor need any one dream that Jefferson and Madison could have carried
this measure by their genius and influence. They were opposed by many
men whose transcendent services, or unequalled oratory, or wealth,
position, financial interests, or intense prejudices would have
enabled them easily to resist their unsupported assaults. Like a
couple of first-class engineers on a tender with a train attached, but
no locomotive, would Jefferson and Madison have appeared without the
Baptists. They furnished the locomotive for these skilled engineers
which drew the train of religious liberty through every persecuting
enactment in the penal code of Virginia.--_Wm. Cathcart, D. D., in
“The Baptists and the American Revolution.”_

The Baptists were the first and only religious denomination that
struck for independence from Great Britain, and the first and only
one that made a move for religious liberty before independence was
declared.... Of those who took part in the struggle for religious
liberty, the Baptists were the only denomination that maintained a
consistent record and held out without wavering until the end--until
every vestige of the old establishment had been obliterated by the
sale of the glebes.--_Dr. Charles James, in “Documentary History of
the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia.”_

THE TORCH-BEARERS OF THE IDEAL OF ROGER WILLIAMS UNTIL LIBERTY
ENLIGHTENED THE WORLD

We have seen the early struggles of Roger Williams. We have seen the
halo of glory which clusters about the State he founded. We have seen
his place in the plans of a Divine providence. We have also seen his
place in the procession of heroes who held aloft the torch of religious
and soul-liberty throughout the ages. When by death, he was compelled
to drop that torch, others took it up and continued the procession
until the first amendment to our National Constitution became a fact
of history. The Baptists led the historic movement in all the colonies
which stood for this principle of “Religious Liberty.” Oscar S. Straus
says:

The Baptists ... had a much more enlightened and advanced view: they
held that Christianity should propagate itself by its own spiritual
force; that the civil government was entirely apart and distinct and
should have no control over conscience, or power to inflict punishment
for spiritual censures.

Professor Gervinus, professor at Heidelberg, Germany, about the year
1850, published a work, in which he referred to Williams and his ideal:

Roger Williams urged an entire liberty of conscience in Massachusetts.
He was obliged to fly from the country, and in 1636 he founded a small
new society in Rhode Island upon the principles of entire liberty of
conscience. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain
a general elective franchise and entire religious liberty would be
of short duration. But these institutions have spread from that
petty state over the whole union. They superseded the aristocratic
commencements of Carolina and New York, the High-church part of
Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout
America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe; and,
dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of
every democratic struggle in Europe.

For the publication of such sentiments, Professor Gervinus was tried
at Mannheim and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment and to have his
books publicly burned.

Back of political progress there must be spiritual strength. Back of
the final victory of religious liberty in America there was not only
the glorious example of Rhode Island as a political demonstration but
the persistent propagation of the ideals in all the States. This was
chiefly the task of the Baptists, many of whose churches could trace
their origin to settlers from Rhode Island.

During the Colonial period, the laws of Massachusetts and Virginia
relating to soul-liberty were most severe; those in Maryland and
Pennsylvania, the most lenient, outside of Rhode Island.

[Illustration: Order banishing the Founders of the First Baptist Church
in Boston.]

[Sidenote: 1644. Nov. 13.]

Whereas Thomas Gold (and others) obstinate and turbulent Annabaptists,
have some time since combined themselves wh others in a pretended
church estate xxxxx to the great griefe and offence of the godly
orthodox xxxxxxxx and about two years since were enjoyned by this
Court to desist from said practise and to returne to our allowed
Church Assemblies, xxxxxx this Court doe judge it necessary that
they be removed to some other part of this country or elsewhere: and
accordingly doeth order that (they) doe before the twentieth of July
next remove themselves out of this jurisdiccon.

In Massachusetts the Baptist sentiment did not die out with the
banishment of Roger Williams. In 1640, Rev. Mr. Chauncey advocated the
immersion of believers and also of infants. Later President Dunster,
of Cambridge College, went further and denounced the whole system
of infant baptism. About the same time, Lady Moody, of Lynn, denied
infant baptism. In 1644, a poor man by the name of Painter, reaching
the same conclusion, refused to have his child baptized. The court
interfered and the man was tied up and whipped. On November 13, 1644,
two months after Williams arrived in Boston, en route to Providence,
with the charter, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law against
the Baptists, in which they were described as “The incendiaries of
commonwealths, the troublers of churches.” They ordered that all who
“openly condemn or oppose the baptizing of infants shall be sentenced
to banishment.” The General Court issued an order in 1644 banishing the
founders of the Boston Baptist Church. In 1651, Obadiah Holmes, John
Clarke, and John Crandall came to Lynn, Massachusetts, from Newport,
Rhode Island. They were holding a service in Mr. Witter’s house, about
two miles out from Lynn. Mr. Clarke was preaching from Revelation
3:10. The service was broken up by the arrival of two constables, who,
with clamorous tongues, interrupted the discourse and arrested the
preachers. The prisoners were held in Lynn until the morning, when they
were taken to the Boston prison. Two weeks later, they were sentenced
to pay heavy fines. The fines of Clarke and Crandall were paid by
friends. Holmes refused any assistance in paying his fine of thirty
pounds and was publicly whipped with thirty lashes from a three-corded
whip. Thirteen others, who sympathized with these brethren, were
arrested and were ordered to pay a fine of forty shillings each or
take ten lashes. John Hazel, an old man from Rehoboth, was whipped
and died a few days afterward. Clarke published the story of this
incident in “Ill Newes from New-England”--an original copy is in the
John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R. I. Cotton was the religious
leader in Boston, back of this persecution. In 1680 the doors of the
Baptist meeting-house in Boston were nailed up by the authorities.
Finally the Baptists in Boston won some freedom, which, however, was
denied to other Baptist churches throughout the State. Isaac Backus
was the leader among the Massachusetts Baptists for soul-liberty. With
President Manning, he appealed to the Massachusetts delegates at the
Continental Congress to provide in the Constitution for separation
of Church and State. John Adams replied to them: “They might as well
turn the heavenly bodies out of their annual and diurnal courses as
to expect they would give up their establishment.” This spirit of
opposition was continued until 1833, in which year the last vestige of
oppressive religious intolerance was removed from the statute-books of
Massachusetts.

[Illustration]

ILL

NEWES

FROM

NEW-ENGLAND

A Narative of _New-Englands_

PERSECUTION.

WHEREIN IS DECLARED

That while old _England_ is becoming new,
_New-England_ is become Old.

Also four Proposals to the Honoured Parliament and Councel of State,
touching the way to _Propagate the Gospel of Christ_ (with small
charge and great safety) both in Old _England_ and New.

Also four conclusions touching the faith and order of the Gospel of
Christ out of his last Will and Testament, confirmed and justified

By JOHN CLARK Physician of Rode Island in _America_.

_Revel._ 2. 25. _Hold fast till I come._
3. 11. _Behold I come quickly._
22. 20. _Amen, even so come Lord Jesus._

_LONDON_,

Printed by _Henry Hills_ living in _Fleet-Yard_ next door to the
_Rose_ and _Crown_, in the year 1652.

In Virginia, the opposition to the Baptist movement was bitter and
unrelenting. The early settlers of Virginia left England, when their
church, the Established Church of England, had won a complete victory
over all other persuasions. The Virginians sought to duplicate in the
new land the spirit of the victors across the sea and make religion
uniform in their colony. Laws were passed against popish recusants as
early as 1643. Other laws were passed by their assembly between the
years 1659 and 1663 against those who failed to have their children
baptized. The Quakers especially found these laws most severe. The
early Baptists of Virginia were of the common people; their ministers
were illiterate; and for a while they escaped notice. The first
imprisonment of Baptists was in the county of Spottsylvania, Va., June
4, 1768. Three Baptists, John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs,
with others, were arrested for disturbing the peace. (There was no
law against preaching.) The opposing lawyer in the court-room made this
charge:

May it please your worships, these men are great disturbers of the
peace; they cannot meet a man on the road, but they ram a text of
Scripture down his throat.

Mr. Waller so defended himself and his brethren that their enemies were
somewhat puzzled to know how to proceed against them. They offered
to release them on promise to refrain from preaching in the county
for a year and a day. The defendants refused the offer and were sent
to prison. Other Baptist ministers were arrested, and soon thirty
were under arrest. The prisons became Baptist pulpits, and multitudes
gathered around them to hear the preachers. Their opponents engaged
drummers to drown the preaching; high enclosures were in some cases
erected before prison windows, and suffocating materials were burned
near the prisons. Baptists from the beginning were unremitting in their
struggle to secure religious liberty. They secured the support of
Patrick Henry, a member of the Established Church, but a firm friend of
all who stood for liberty, civil and religious. He helped the Baptists
to win the complete victory.

The Baptist cause was destined to have a more congenial atmosphere
in Pennsylvania when we remember that William Penn, its illustrious
founder, had an English Baptist father and a Dutch mother, undoubtedly
of Anabaptist descent. He received his charter in 1681, forty-five
years after Roger Williams’ banishment from Massachusetts. Penn
possessed broad and liberal ideas and was opposed to any church
establishment. He provided

that all persons who confess and acknowledge the Almighty and Eternal
God to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of the world, ... should
in no ways be molested, nor compelled to frequent or maintain any
religious worship.

Yet only those confessing faith in Jesus Christ could become freemen in
Penn’s domain. The separate Quakers in the colony of Pennsylvania were
arrested, fined, and imprisoned for dissent.

[Illustration: John Clarke Memorial First Baptist Church of Newport, R.
I.]

[Illustration: Grave of John Clarke]

The first company of Baptists in this colony came from Rhode Island.
William Dugan came there in 1684, three years after Penn received
his charter. He settled at Cold Spring, in Bucks County. The first
church in Philadelphia was founded by John Holmes in 1686. The first
meeting-place was at the corner of Second and Chestnut Streets.

[Illustration: The Law in William Penn’s Colony. No Absolute
Soul-liberty in Pennsylvania in Those Days.]

[Sidenote: Two Thirds of the Members have the Power of a full House.
No Member to vote &c. in the House till qualified. The Qualification
of every Member of Assembly. Altered by an Act pass’d in the II Geo.
I, entitled An Act--prescribing the Forms of Declaration of Fidelity.
&c.]

AND if any County or Part of this Province shall refuse or neglect to
choose their respective Representatives as aforesaid, or if chosen, do
not meet to serve in Assembly, those who are so chosen and met shall
have the full Power of an Assembly in as ample Manner as if all the
Representatives had been chosen and met; Provided, they are not less
than two Thirds of the Whole that ought to meet.

AND BE IT FURTHER ENACTED by the Authority aforesaid, That no
Person who shall be hereafter a Member of the Assembly, or House of
Representatives of this Province, shall be capable to vote in the said
House, or sit there during any Debate, after their Speaker is chosen,
until he shall make and subscribe the following Declarations and
Profession his Belief, _viz._,

_I_ A. B. _do sincerely promise, and solemnly declare before GOD
and the World, That I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to
Queen_ Anne. _And I do solemnly profess and declare. That I do,
from my Heart, abbor, detest and renounce as impious and heretical,
that damnable Doctrine and Position, That Princes excommunicated or
deprived by the Pope, or any Authority of the See of_ Rome, _may be
deposed or murdered by their Subjects, or any other whatsoever_.

_AND I do declare, That no foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State
or Potentate hath, or ought to have, any Power, Jurisdiction,
Superiority, Preeminence or Authority ecclesiastical or spiritual,
within the Realm of_ England, _or the Dominions thereunto belonging_.

_AND I_ A. B. _do solemnly and sincerely, in the Presence of_ GOD,
_profess, testify and declare, That I do believe that in the Sacrament
of the_ LORD’s _Supper there is not any Transubstantiation of the
Elements of Bread and Wine into the Body and Blood of_ CHRIST, _at or
after the Consecration thereof, by any Person whatsoever; and that the
Invocation or Adoration of the Virgin_ Mary, _or any other Saint, and
the Sacrifice of the_ Mass, _as they are now used in the Church of_
Rome, _are superstitions and Idolatrous_.

_AND I do solemnly, in the Presence of_ GOD, _profess, testify and
declare. That I do make this Declaration and every Part thereof, in
the plain and ordinary Sense of the Words read unto me, as they are
commonly understood by_ English Protestants, _without any Evasion,
Equivocation or mental Reservation whatsoever and without any
Dispensation already granted me for this Purpose by the Pope, or any
other Authority or Person whatsoever, or without any Hope of any such
Dispensation from any Person or Authority whatsoever, or without
thinking I am or may be acquitted before_ GOD, _or Man, or absolved of
this Declaration, or any Part thereof, although the Pope, or any other
Person or Persons, or Power whatsoever, should dispense with or annull
the same, or declare that it was null or void from the Beginning_.

_AND I_ A. B. _profess Faith in_ GOD _the Father, and in_ JESUS
CHRIST, _his eternal Son, the true_ GOD, _and in the_ HOLY SPIRIT,
_one_ GOD, _blessed for evermore; and do acknowledge the_ Holy
Scriptures _of the_ Old _and_ New-Testament, _to be given by divine
Inspiration_.

Lord Baltimore, the Roman Catholic proprietor of Maryland, was far in
advance of his Church. He came to the New World to secure religious
liberty for himself and his friends. The Maryland Act of Toleration,
issued in 1649, provided that

Blasphemy against God, and a denial of the Trinity should be punished
with death and confiscation of lands and goods, and blasphemy against
the Virgin Mary should first be punished by a fine of five pounds, and
if persisted in, by a forfeiture of all possessions and banishment
from the colony.

[Illustration: The Law Concerning Religious Toleration in Maryland
Colony. It is not Religious Liberty.]

[Sidenote: 1649.]

Acts and Orders of ASSEMBLY, assented to, enacted and made, at a
General Session of the said Assembly, begun and held at _St. Mary_’s
on the 2d Day of _April_ 1649, and ended the 21st Day of the same
Month.

WILLIAM STONE, Esq; Governor.

CHAP. I. [Illustration]

[Sidenote: Passed 21st of _April_ 1649.]

_An Act concerning Religion. Lib._ C _and_ WH. _fol._ 106. _Lib._ WH.
_fol._ 111. _and Lib._ WH _and_ L. _fol._ 1.

Confirmed among the perpetual Laws 1676, _ch._ 2.

_N. B._ By this Law, (1.) Blasphemy against GOD, denying our Saviour
JESUS CHRIST to be the Son of GOD, or denying the Holy TRINITY, or the
Godhead of any of the Three Persons, _&c._ was to be Punished with
Death, and Confiscation of Lands and Goods to the Lord Proprietary.
(2.) Persons using any reproachful Words or Speeches concerning the
Blessed Virgin _Mary_, Mother of our Saviour, or the Holy Apostles
or Evangelists, or any of them, for the 1st Offence to forfeit 5_l._
Sterling to the Lord Proprietary; or, in default of Payment, to be
publicly Whipped, and Imprisoned at the Pleasure of his Lordship, or
his Lieut. General. For the 2d Offence to forfeit 10_l._ Sterling,
or in default of Payment to be publicly and severely Whipped, and
Imprisoned as before directed. And for the 3d Offence to forfeit Lands
and Goods, and be for ever Banished out of the Province. (3.) Persons
reproaching any other within the Province by the Name or Denomination
of Heretic, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian,
Popish Priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvinist,
Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Round-Head, Separatist,
or any other Name or Term in a reproach-

The Baptist church at Chestnut Ridge was formed in 1742 by Henry
Sator, a layman of the General Baptist order, who had recently come
from England. He invited Baptist ministers to preach in his house. They
soon gathered a congregation; proselytes were gained, and a church
organized. This church appealed to the governor and was taken under the
protection of the toleration laws.

[Illustration: Puritan-Religious-Liberty! Facsimile of original laws.
From “Body of Liberties.” First legal code for the government of the
Bay Colony. Drawn up by Rev. Nathaniel Ward, Lawyer-divine of Ipswich.]

94. _Capitall Laws._

[Sidenote: Dut. 13. 6, 10.

Dut. 17. 2, 6

Ex. 22. 20.]

[Sidenote: P. 14.

S. 1.]

If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other
god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.

[Sidenote: Ex. 22. 18.

Lev. 20. 27.

Dut. 18. 10.]

[Sidenote: S. 2.]

If any man or woeman be a witch, (that is hath or consulteth with a
familiar spirit,) They shall be put to death.

[Sidenote: Lev. 24. 15, 16.]

[Sidenote: S. 3.]

If any man shall Blaspheme the name of god, the father, Sonne or Holie
ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptuous or high handed blasphemie,
or shall curse god in the like manner, he shall be put to death.

THE FINAL VICTORY IN THE LONG STRUGGLE

Two Baptist organizations in close sympathy with each other contributed
much toward the final victory. They made appeals to their immediate
constituency and also to the larger following of all Baptists and other
lovers of religious liberty. These were the Warren Association in New
England, and the General Committee in Virginia. Each had a committee
of grievances. The Baptists were nobly assisted by Presbyterians and
Quakers in the final stages of the great conflict. Isaac Backus wrote
his immortal work on “A History of New England, with Especial Reference
to the Baptists.” He drafted appeals for the Association and for the
committee on grievances to the General Assembly, published addresses on
religious liberty, and inserted advertisements in leading papers. He
believed that partial history and false statements regarding Baptist
history and doctrines should be removed by scattering impartial and
true knowledge. He was a Baptist giant and had his share in forming
sentiment, which eventually made religious intoleration impossible in
America.

Isaac Backus, with President Manning, of Brown University, then Rhode
Island College, went to Philadelphia and with Quakers and others
appealed to John Adams and other Massachusetts delegates in Carpenter
Hall, Philadelphia. These advocates of soul-liberty took the position
that to pay taxes to support a church clergy in which they did not
believe was as much a wrong as to pay taxes for a government in which
they had no representation. It was not the paltry tax of fourpence a
man that the colonists in Massachusetts rebelled against. It was the
principle that was back of paying the pence which they opposed. They
were greatly amazed when John Adams told them that their own colony,
Massachusetts, had “the most mild and equitable establishment of
religion that was known in the world.”

[Illustration: William Rogers James Manning Isaac Backus These men were
all connected with the opening of the first Baptist college in America.
James Manning was the first president; Isaac Backus, a member of the
original board of trustees; William Rogers, the first student.]

The Virginia Baptists, through their General Convention, organized in
1784, united the efforts of the Baptists there and in New England for
the final phases of the war against religious tyranny. For four years
they had worked for liberty in their State laws and had won a complete
victory. Then, in 1788, they turned to the national issue. The Federal
Constitution had provided in Article VI, “No religious Test shall ever
be required as a qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States.” This did not satisfy the Baptists, because religious
tests might be imposed for other purposes than those specified. In a
noble letter, drafted by John Leland, a Baptist minister, they appealed
to Washington. They paid a high compliment to his achievements and
then stated their grievance, closing with these words:

If religious liberty is rather insecure in the Constitution the
administration will certainly prevent all oppression, for a WASHINGTON
will preside. Should the horrid evils that have been so pestiferous
in Asia and Europe, faction, ambition, war, perfidy, fraud, and
persecution for conscience sake, ever approach the borders of
our happy nation, may the name and administration of our beloved
President, like the radiant source of day, scatter all the dark clouds
from the American hemisphere.

Washington replied that his ideals were the same, assuring them of
this, in the following words:

No one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual
barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny and every species of
religious persecution.

He complimented the Baptists and said that they

have been, throughout America, uniformly and almost unanimously, the
firm friends to civil liberty, and the persevering promoters of our
glorious revolution.

His assurance was not empty words. In a short time James Madison, with
the President’s approval, submitted certain amendments. Article VI was
superseded by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which specified:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Thus the long fight was won in America, and now people generally
appreciate the importance of the victory gained. Rhode Island may
have hesitated to accept the imperfect Constitution, with its lack of
assurance for complete religious liberty. In this connection we should
not forget that Massachusetts and Connecticut were the last to ratify
the First Amendment.

VII

THE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE OF ROGER 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’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._

THE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE OF ROGER WILLIAMS’ IDEAL

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 missionary to 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 of Mexico, 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.

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 the Established
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.

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.

STUDY OUTLINE OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROGER WILLIAMS

ROGER WILLIAMS AND HIS TIMES

1. _Rise and Development of English Puritanism_: Reformation in
England, from Wyclif to Henry VIII. Reformation under Henry VIII,
Edward VI, and Elizabeth. Influence of the Marian exiles. Rise of
English Puritanism. Influence and mission of Thomas Cartwright and
Robert Browne. Growth of Presbyterianism and independency. Origin of
British Baptists (in Wales and England).

2. _Contemporaneous Colonial Settlements_: The Plymouth Pilgrims. The
Dorchester Adventurers. Naumkeag settlers. Endicott Company at Salem.
Winthrop Company at Boston. Connecticut settlers. Early Dutch and
Virginia settlements. (Study idealism, origin, vitality of each.)

3. _Indian Predecessors of Roger Williams and Puritans_: Tribal
settlements, their ideas, customs, and moral status. Ideas of
soul-liberty among the Indians. Priority of Williams’ Indian missionary
work. Labors of Eliot and others.

ROGER WILLIAMS, HIS LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS

1. _Life Prior to Exile from England, 1602-1629_: His birth and
education. Religious ferment in England. His love affairs, marriage,
and exile.

2. _In New England Prior to Settlement in Providence, 1629-1636_:
Experiences in Boston, Salem, Plymouth, the wilderness, and Seekonk.

3. _Providence Plantations Prior to First Charter, 1636-1644_:
Arrival. Reception by Indians. First deeds to property. Baptism.
Early government. Indian troubles. Neighbors at Pawtuxet, Warwick,
Portsmouth, and Blackstone. Williams’ first visit to England. First
charter. Indian trading-post near Wickford. His first writings.

4. _Providence under the First Charter, 1644-1663_: Growth of colony.
Indian difficulties. Coddington’s claims. Opposition from the United
Colonies. Williams’ second visit to England. His writings. Work of his
colaborer, John Clarke, of Newport, in securing second charter.

5. _Growth, Destruction, and Rebuilding of Providence, 1663-1676_:
General pre-Indian War prosperity. The Quakers. The debate and
Williams’ writings. Indian War with King Philip. Reconstruction.

6. _Closing Days and Death of Roger Williams_: Official position.
Retirement and death. Burial. Later removal of dust.

7. _Providence after the Death of its Founder_: Commercially,
religiously, educationally, and politically. Its glorious share in the
Revolutionary War. Its glory among the brotherhood of States. Growth of
its ideal throughout the world.

III

THE EVOLUTION OF THE ROGER WILLIAMS IDEAL OF SOUL-LIBERTY

1. _Prior to Days of Williams_: The pioneers, the predecessors of
Williams, and the continuity of the struggle for soul-liberty among the
early Christians. The work of the Anabaptists or Baptists in the Dark
Ages in northern Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and England and
Wales. Study their published confessions on the subject of soul-liberty.

2. _Contemporaries of Roger Williams_: The General and Particular
Baptists of England. A consideration of the ideals of toleration,
liberty of conscience, and absolute soul-liberty in the settlements
of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts Bay Colony,
Connecticut; and the Indian’s position also. Compare all these with the
peculiar position of Roger Williams.

3. _Successors of Roger Williams_: The American Baptists. Study
especially the Warren Baptist Association with its committee on
grievances. Study the work of the Philadelphia Baptist Convention.
Study also the work of the Baptists in other States. Cooperation of
Quakers, Presbyterians, and others.

THE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE OF ROGER WILLIAMS’ IDEAL

Political democracy, a fruit of religious liberty. The onward march of
democracy in America, Europe, Asia, and South America. The world war
and the world-wide struggle for democracy. Present status of the world
as to religious liberty and as to political democracy. (Take a map and
indicate the same.)

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

_Biographies_:

Backus, “History of New England.” (First history in which Williams’
life-story is told at length.)

Knowles, “Memoir of Roger Williams.”

Gammell, “Life of Roger Williams.”

Elton, “Life of Roger Williams.”

Straus, “Roger Williams, Pioneer of Religious Liberty.”

Carpenter, “Roger Williams, A Political Pioneer.”

Hall, “Roger Williams.”

_Original Documents_:

“Complete Writings of Roger Williams,” Narragansett Club Publications.

Bradford, “The Bradford History.”

Winthrop, “History of the Puritans.”

Chapin, “Documentary History of Rhode Island.”

Early Colonial Records.

Early Records of the Town of Providence. Vols. III, IV, V, VIII.

Cotton, “Magnalia.”

_General Histories_:

Arnold, “History of Rhode Island.”

Staples, “Annals of Providence.”

Greene, “Providence Plantations for 250 Years.”

Richman, “Rhode Island, Its Making and its Meaning.”

_Evolution of Soul-liberty_:

King, “Religious Liberty.”

Ivimey, “History of English Baptists.”

General Baptist Church Histories, by Benedict, Armitage, Newman,
Cathcart, Vedder, etc.

Mullins, “Axioms of Religion.”

_Historic Spots_:

Guild, “Footprints of Roger Williams.”

Hopkins, “The Home Lots of the Early Settlers.”

State of Rhode Island, “Report of Committee on Marking of Historic
Sites in Rhode Island.”

Rider, “Lands of Rhode Island as They Were Known to Canonicus.”

_Fiction_:

Butterworth, “In the Days of Massasoit.”

Hall, “The Golden Arrow.”

Durfee, the epic poem, “What Cheer.”

_Other Books and Pamphlets_:

H. M. King, “Baptism of Roger Williams,” “Summer Visit of Three Rhode
Islanders,” “The Mother Church,” “The True Roger Williams,” “Life of
John Miles,” “Historical Catalog of First Baptist Church.”

Kimball, “Providence in Colonial Times.”

Dexter, “As to Roger Williams’ Banishment.”

Burrage, “Why Was Roger Williams Banished?”

Merriman, “Pilgrim, Puritan, and Roger Williams.”

Dorr, “The Planting and Growth of Providence.”

Burgess, “Reconciliation of Government with Liberty.”

Eaton, “Roger Williams, the Founder of Providence.”

Durfee, “Complete Works of Job Durfee.”

Backus Historical Society, “Elements in Baptist Development.”

_Notable Addresses_:

Z. Allan, “Memorial of Roger Williams.”

W. H. P. Faunce, “Roger Williams and His Doctrine of Soul Liberty.”

Mowry, “Concerning Roger Williams.”

Durfee, “Oration on 250th Anniversary.”

Rabbi A. Simon, “Thanksgiving Address on Roger Williams.”

Diman, “Address at Unveiling of Statue of Roger Williams at Roger
Williams Park.”

Proceedings in Congress on Receiving the Roger Williams Statue.

AN ITINERARY FOR A HISTORIC PILGRIMAGE

PLACES OF INTEREST OUTSIDE OF RHODE ISLAND

_In England_: Charterhouse School. Pembroke College, Cambridge.

_In America_: Salem: Site of First Meeting House. The original old
First Church. The Original Roger Williams House (The Witch House).

Plymouth: Coles Hill. The Burial Hill. Harbor. The Meresteads.

Boston and Vicinity: Original Bradford History in State House. Site
of Meeting House where trial took place (Dunster and Meeting Streets,
Cambridge). Site of old First Church.

New York City: Roger Williams’ Watch, in Fraunce’s Tavern.

PLACES OF INTEREST IN RHODE ISLAND

_In Providence_: Study a map of the original Home Lots in relation to
the present streets of Providence. (Hopkins, “Home Lots,” is good.)

Capitol Building: The Original Charter from Charles II. The Original
Portsmouth Compact in Secretary of State’s Office.

Court House: Grant’s picture of Landing of Williams.

City Hall: Original Deeds from the Indians. Williams’ Letter of
transference. Original Compact of Providence Settlers.

Civic Center: Symbolical Statuary on Post Office Building. Civic Center
is probably the site of Williams’ baptism.

The Rhode Island Historical Society’s Building: The Apple Tree Roots
from Grave of Williams, his Compass, etc.

John Hay Library: Copy of Roger Williams’ Indian Bible.

John Carter Brown Library: Original Copies of Williams’ books and
letters.

Brown University.

Site of Town Meetings at Entrance to Tunnel.

First Baptist Church: The Bell. Specimen from What Cheer Rock in Lobby.
Pictures of Pastors, etc.

Pardon Tillinghast’s Grave, Benefit Street near Transit.

What Cheer Rock, Roger and Williams Streets.

Sabin Tavern, South Main Street and Transit, Where Gaspee Plot was
hatched.

Old School House on Meeting Street Opposite to this, Site of First Post
Office.

Old State House, where First Declaration of Independence was signed.

Site of Spring, 244 North Main Street.

Site of Roger Williams House, North Main and Alamo Streets.

Grave of Roger Williams, rear of Stable, 108 Benefit Street.

North Burial Ground: Canonicus Rock. Randall Tomb. (Removal Place for
Dust of Williams.) Graves of Manning and Wayland. Memorial to Chad
Brown.

Hopkins Square: Grave and Monument to Admiral Hopkins, Charles Street
and Branch Avenue. The Home of Admiral Hopkins on Admiral Street.

Roger Williams Park: Statue of Williams. Museum with Indian Relics and
Model of Indian Village.

_Out from Providence_: Fort Independence Site at Field’s Point. Gaspee
Point beyond. Drum Rock, Apponaug. Grave of Ezekiel Holliman, Shawomet.
Site of Williams’ Trading-post, Wickford. Indian Soapstone Quarry,
Johnston. Barrington, R. I. Pierce’s Fight, Central Falls.

_Sites at Newport_: Town of Portsmouth on Island. Site of Governor
Bull’s House. First Baptist Church. Graves of Clarke and of Coddington.

_Old Houses_: Gilbert Stuart’s House, North Kingston. Nathanael
Greene’s House, Cumberland. Reynolds’ House (Headquarters of
Lafayette), Bristol. Prescott’s Headquarters, Portsmouth. Stephen
Hopkins’ House, Hopkins Street, Providence.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Small capitals have been capitalised.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.

Repetative chapter headings have been removed.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty" ***

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