RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY. TRIBUTE TO ROGER WILLIAMS. (Signs of the Times 1833)

We extract the following beautiful passage from the first volume of Bancroft’s History of the United States, just published by Mr. Chas. Bowen, of this city.

While the state was thus connected by the closest bonds, the energy of its faith with its form of government, there appeared in its midst one of those clear minds, which sometimes bless the world by their power of receiving moral truth in its purest light, and of reducing the just conclusions of their principles to a happy and consistent practice. In February of the first year of the Colony, but a few months after the arrival of Winthrop, and before either Cotton or Hooker had embarked for New England, there arrived at Nantasket, after a stormy passage of 66 days, a “young minister, godly and zealous, having precious gifts.” It was Roger Williams. He was then but a little more than thirty years of age, but his mind had already matured a doctrine which secures him an immortality of fame, as its application has given religious peace to the American world. He was a puritan and a fugitive from English persecution, but his wrongs had not clouded his accurate understanding; in the zealous recesses of his mind, he had revolved the nature of intolerance, and he, and he alone, had arrived at the great principle which is its sole effectual remedy. He announced his discovery under the simple proposition of the sanctity of conscience. The civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control opinion; should punish guilt, but never violate the freedom of the soul. The doctrine contained within itself an entire reformation of theological jurisprudence; it would blot from the statute-book the crime of non-conformity; would quench the fires that persecution had so long kept burning; would repeal every law compelling attendance on public worship; would abolish tithes and all forced contributions to the maintenance of religion; would give an equal protection to every form of religious faith; and never suffer the authority of the civil government to be enlisted against the mosque of the muselman or the altar of the fire-worshipper, against the Jewish synagogue or the Roman cathedral.

It is wonderful, with what distinctness Roger Williams deduced these inferences from his great principle, the consistency with which, like Pascal and Edwards, those bold and profound reasoners on other subjects, he adopted every fair inference from his doctrines, and the circumspection with which he repelled every unjust imputation. In the unwavering assertion of his views, he never changed his position; the sanctity of conscience was the great tenet, which, with all its consequences, he defended, as he first trode the shores of New England; and in his extreme old age, it was the last pulsation of his heart. But it placed the young emigrant in direct opposition to the whole system, on which Massachusetts was founded; and gentle and forgiving as was his temper, prompt as he was to concede everything honestly permitted, he always asserted his belief with temperate firmness and undaunted benevolence.

So soon, therefore, as Williams arrived in Boston, he found himself among the New-England churches, but not of them. They had not yet renounced the use of force in religion, and he could not, with his entire mind, adhere to churches which retained the offensive features of English legislation. What then was the condition of the colony when it was found that the people of Salem desired to receive him as their teacher? The court of Boston “marvelled” at the precipitate decision, and the people of Salem were required to forbear. Williams withdrew to the settlement of Plymouth and remained there about two years. But his virtues had won the affections of the church of Salem, and the apostle of intellectual liberty was once more welcomed to their confidence. He remained the object of public jealousy. How mild his conduct was is evident from an example. He had written an essay on the nature of the tenure by which the colonists held their lands in America, and he had argued that an English patent could not invalidate the rights of the native inhabitants. The opinion sounded at first like treason against the cherished charter of the colony; Williams desired only that the offensive manuscript might be burned, and so effectually explained its purport, that the court applauded his temper, and declared “that the matter was not so evil, as at first they seemed.”

But the principles of Roger Williams led him into perpetual collision with the clergy and the government of Massachusetts. It had ever been their custom to respect the church of England; and in the mother country, they frequented its service without scruple; yet its principles and its administration were still harshly exclusive. Williams would hold no communion with intolerance; for, said he, “the doctrine of persecution for the cause of conscience is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus.”

The magistrates insisted on the presence of every man at public worship; Williams replied that the law, “the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling seemed only like requiring hypocrisy. “An unbelieving soul is dead in sin,” such was his argument; and to force the indifferent from one worship to another was like shifting a dead man into several changes of apparel.” “No one,” he added, “to maintain a worship against his own consent.” “What?” exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets; “is not the laborer worthy of his hire?” “Yes,” replied he, “from them who hire him.”

The magistrates were selected exclusively from the members of the church; with equal propriety, reasoned Williams, “might a doctor of physic or a pilot” be selected according to his skill in theology and his standing in the church.

It was objected to him that his principles subverted all good government. The commander of the vessel or state, replied Williams, may maintain order on board the ship, and see that it pursues its course steadily, even though the dissenters of the crew are not compelled to attend the public prayers of their commanders.

But the controversy finally turned on the question of the rights and duties of magistrates to guard the minds of the people against corruption and to punish what would seem to them error and heresy. Magistrates, Williams asserted, are but the agents of the people, or its trustees, on whom a spiritual power in matters of worship can ever be conferred; since conscience belongs to the individual and is not the property of the body politic; and with admirable dialectics, clothing the great truth in its boldest form, he asserted that “the civil magistrate may not intermeddle even to stop a church from apostacy and heresy,” that equal protection should be extended to every sect and every form of worship. With corresponding distinctness, he foresaw the influence of his principles on society. “The removal of the yoke of soul-oppression,” to use the words in which, at a later day, he confirmed his early view, “as it will prove an act of mercy and righteousness to the enslaved nations, so it is of [binding] force to engage the whole and every interest and conscience to preserve the common liberty and peace.”

The same magistrates who punished Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, for his freedom in censuring their measures, could not brook the independence of Williams; and the circumstances of the times seemed to them to justify their apprehensions. [As] intense jealousy was excited in England against Massachusetts; “members of the General Court received [intimations] of some episcopal and malignant practices against the country;” and the magistrates on the one hand were scrupulously careful to avoid all unnecessary offence to the English government, while on the other, they considered their own institutions and even prepared for resistance. It was in this view that the Freeman’s Oath was appointed, by which every freeman was obliged to pledge his allegiance not to King Charles but to Massachusetts. There was room for scruples on the subject, and in English law, it would have questioned the legality of the measure.

The liberty of conscience for which Williams contended denied the compulsory imposition of an oath; when he was summoned before the court, he could not resist his belief; and his influence was such that the government was forced to desist from that proceeding. To the magistrates, he seemed the ally of a civil faction; to himself, he appeared only to make a frank avowal of the truth. In all his intercourse with the tribunals, he spoke with the distinctness of settled convictions. He was fond of discussion, but he was never betrayed into angry remonstrance. If he was charged with pride, it was only for the novelty of his opinions.

The scholar who is accustomed to the pursuits of abstract philosophy lives in a world of thought, far different from that by which he is surrounded. The range of his understanding is remote from the paths of common minds, and he is often the victim of the contrast. It is not unusual for the world to reject the voice of truth, because its tones are strange; to declare doctrines unsound, only because they are new; and even to charge obliquity or [derangement] on the man, who brings forward principles which the many repudiate. Such had ever been the way of the world; and Socrates, and St. Paul, and Luther, and others of the most acute dialecticians, have been ridiculed as drillers and madmen. The extraordinary development of one faculty may sometimes injure the balance of the mind; just as the constant exercise of one member of the body [injures] the beauty of its proportions; or as the exclusive devotion to one pursuit, politics for instance, or money, brushes away from conduct and character the agreeable varieties of light and shade. It is an ancient remark that folly has a [crease?] in the brain of every wise man; and certain it is, that not the poet, nor wise Tasso, but the clearheaded Sir Isaac Newton, Pascal, Spinoza, have been deeply tinged with insanity. Perhaps Williams pursued his sublime principles with too scrupulous minuteness; it was at least natural for Bradford and his contemporaries, while they acknowledged his power as a preacher, to esteem him “unsettled in judgment.”

The court at Boston remained as yet undecided; when the church of Salem, those who were best acquainted with Williams, taking no notice of the recent investigations, elected him to the office of their teacher. Immediately, the evil influence of a religious establishment began to be displayed. The ministers got together and declared him worthy of banishment, who should obstinately assert that which Williams had maintained, even to stop a church from apostasy and heresy; the magistrates followed in their turn; but a committee of [deputies] was sent to repair to Salem and deal with the church [for] [its] contempt. Meanwhile, the people of Salem were blamed for their choice of church guide, and a tract of land, to which they had a claim, was withheld from them as a punishment.

The breach was therefore widened. To the ministers, Williams [rarely?] but temperately explained his doctrines; and he was armed at all points for their defence. As his townsmen had just their lands in consequence of their attachment to him, it would have been cowardice on his part to have abandoned them; and the interest of liberty led him again to the suggestion of a proper remedy. In conjunction with the church, he wrote “letters of admonition unto all” the churches whereof any of the magistrates were members, that they might admonish the magistrates of their injustice.” The church members alone were freemen; Williams, in modern language, appealed to the people and invited them to instruct their representatives to do justice to the citizens of Salem.

The last act seemed flagrant treason, and at the next general court, Salem was disfranchised till an ample apology for the letter should be made. The town acquiesced in its wrongs and submitted; not an individual remained willing to justify the letter of remonstrance; the church of Williams would not avow his great principle of the sanctity of conscience; even his wife, under a delusive idea of duty, was for a season influenced to disturb the tranquility of his home by her reproaches. Williams was left alone, absolutely alone. Anticipating the censures of the colonial churches, he declared himself no longer subjected to their spiritual jurisdiction. “My own voluntary withdrawing from all these churches, resolved to continue in persecuting the witnesses of the Lord; presenting light unto them, I confess it was my own voluntary act yea, I hope the act of the Lord Jesus,” proclaiming truth as with the voice of a trumpet. When summoned to appear before the general court, he avowed his convictions in the presence of the representatives of the state, “maintained the rocky strength of his grounds,” and declared himself “ready to be bound and banished and even to die in New England” rather than renounce the opinions which had dawned upon the mind in the clearness of light. At a time when Germany was the battlefield for all Europe in the implacable wars of religion, when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions, when France was still to go through the fearful struggle with bigotry, when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance, more than forty years before Wm Penn became an American proprietary, and Roger Williams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty. It became his glory to found a state upon that principle, and to stamp himself upon its rising institutions, in characters so deep that the impress has remained to the present day, and like the image of Phidias on the shield of Minerva, can never be erased without a total destruction of the work. The principles which he first sustained amidst the bickerings of a colonial parish, next asserted in the general court of Massachusetts, and then introduced into the wilds of Narragansett Bay; he soon found occasion to publish to the world; and to defend as the basis of the religious freedom of mankind; as the lark, that pleasant bird of the peaceful summer, “affecting to soar aloft, springs upward from the ground, takes his rise from pale to tree,” and at last surmounting the highest hills, utters his clear carols through the skies of morning. He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law, and in its defense, he was the harbinger of Milton, the superior of Jeremy Taylor. For Taylor limited his toleration to a few sects; the philanthropy of Williams compassed the earth; Taylor favored partial reform, commended laity, argued for forbearance, and entered a special plea in behalf of each tolerable sect; Williams would permit persecution of no opinion, of no religion, leaving heresy unarmed by law, and orthodoxy unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes. Taylor still clung to the necessity of positive regulations enforcing religion and eradicating error; he resembled the poets who, in their folly, first declare their hero to be invulnerable and then clothe him in earthly armor. Williams was willing to leave Truth alone, in her own panoply of light, believing that if, in the ancient feud between Truth and Error, the employment of force could be entirely abrogated, Truth would have much the best of the bargain. It is the custom of mankind to award high honors to the successful inquirer into the laws of nature, to those who advance the bounds of human knowledge. We praise the man who first analyzed the air, or resolved water into its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds, though the condition of physical investigations may have ripened the public mind at the time for the advancement in science. A moral principle has a much wider and nearer influence on human happiness; nor can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to society than that which establishes a perpetual religious peace and spreads tranquility through every community and every bosom. If Copernicus is held in perpetual reverence, because on his death bed he published to the world that the sun is the centre of our system, if the name of Kepler is preserved in the annals of human excellence for his sagacity in detecting the laws of the planetary motion, if the genius of Newton has been almost adored for dissecting a ray of light and weighing heavenly bodies, as in a balance, let there before the name of Roger Williams at least some humble place among those who have advanced moral science and made themselves the benefactors of mankind.

But if the opinion of posterity is no longer divided, the members of the general court of that day pronounced against him the sentence of exile; yet not by a very numerous majority.

Some gentlemen who consented to his banishment, would never have yielded but for the persuasions of Cotton: and the judgment was vindicated not as a punishment for opinion, or as a restraint on freedom of conscience, but because the application of a new doctrine to the construction of the patent, to the discipline of the churches, and to the “oath for taking freedom of the people,” seemed about “to subvert the fundamental state and government of the country.”

Winter was at hand; Williams succeeded in obtaining permission to remain till spring, intending then to begin a plantation in Narragansett Bay. But the affections of the people of Salem revived and could not be restrained; they thronged to his house to hear him who they were so soon to lose forever, if begun to be rumored, that he could not safely be allowed to found a new state in the vicinity; the people were “many of them much taken with the apprehension of his goodness; there was evident danger that his opinions were contagious; that the infection would spread very widely.” It was therefore resolved to remove him to England in a ship that was just ready to set sail. A warrant was accordingly sent to him to come to Boston and embark. For the first time, he declined the summons of the court. A pinnace was sent for him; the officers repaired to his house; he was no longer there. Three days before, he had left Salem, in winter snow and inclement weather, of which he remembered the severity even in his late old age. “For fourteen weeks he was sorely tost in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” Often in the stormy night, he had neither fire, nor food, nor company; often he wandered “without a guide, and had no house but a hollow tree.” But he was not without friends. The same scrupulous respect for the rights of others, which had led him to defend the freedom of conscience, had made him also the champion of the Indians. He had already been zealous to acquire their language and knew it so well that he could debate with them in their own dialect. During his residence at Plymouth, he had often been the guest of the neighboring sachems; and now, when he came in winter to the cabin of the chief of Pokanoket, he was welcomed by Massasoit, and “the barbarous heart of Canonicus, the chief of the Narragansets, loved him as his son, to the last gasp.” “The ravens,” he relates with gratitude, “fed me in the wilderness.” And in requital for their hospitality, he was ever through his long life their friend and benefactor; the apostle of Christianity to them without hire, without weakness, and without imputation of mercenary; the guardian of their rights; the pacificator, when their rude passions were Some gentlemen who consented to his banishment, would never have yielded but for the persuasions of Cotton: and the judgment was vindicated not as a punishment for opinion, or as a restraint on freedom of conscience, but because the application of a new doctrine to the construction of the patent, to the discipline of the churches, and to the “oath for taking freedom of the people,” seemed about “to subvert the fundamental state and government of the country.”

Winter was at hand; Williams succeeded in obtaining permission to remain till spring, intending then to begin a plantation in Narragansett Bay. But the affections of the people of Salem revived and could not be restrained; they thronged to his house to hear him who they were so soon to lose forever, if begun to be rumored, that he could not safely be allowed to found a new state in the vicinity; the people were “many of them much taken with the apprehension of his goodness; there was evident danger that his opinions were contagious; that the infection would spread very widely.” It was therefore resolved to remove him to England in a ship that was just ready to set sail. A warrant was accordingly sent to him to come to Boston and embark. For the first time, he declined the summons of the court. A pinnace was sent for him; the officers repaired to his house; he was no longer there. Three days before, he had left Salem, in winter snow and inclement weather, of which he remembered the severity even in his late old age. “For fourteen weeks he was sorely tost in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” Often in the stormy night, he had neither fire, nor food, nor company; often he wandered “without a guide, and had no house but a hollow tree.” But he was not without friends. The same scrupulous respect for the rights of others, which had led him to defend the freedom of conscience, had made him also the champion of the Indians. He had already been zealous to acquire their language and knew it so well that he could debate with them in their own dialect. During his residence at Plymouth, he had often been the guest of the neighboring sachems; and now, when he came in winter to the cabin of the chief of Pokanoket, he was welcomed by Massasoit, and “the barbarous heart of Canonicus, the chief of the Narragansets, loved him as his son, to the last gasp.” “The ravens,” he relates with gratitude, “fed me in the wilderness.” And in requital for their hospitality, he was ever through his long life their friend and benefactor; the apostle of Christianity to them without hire, without weakness, and without imputation of mercenary; the guardian of their rights; the pacificator, when their rude passions were inflamed; and their unflinching advocate and protector, whenever Europeans attempted an invasion of their rights.

He first pitched and began to build and plant at Seekuk. But Seekonk was found to be within the patent of Plymouth; on the other side of the water, the country opened in its unappropriated beauty; and here he might hope to establish a community as free as the other colonies.

It was in June that the lawgiver of Rhode-Island, with five companions, embarked in the stream; a frail canoe contained the founder of an independent state and its earliest citizens. Tradition has marked the spring, near which they landed; it is the parent spot, the first inhabited nook of Rhode-Island. To express his unbroken confidence in the mercies of God, Williams called the place Providence. “I desired,” said he, “it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

In his new abode, Williams could have less leisure for contemplation and study. “My time,” he observes of himself, and it is a sufficient apology for the roughness of his style, “as everyone knows, was not spent altogether in spiritual labors; but day and night, at home and abroad, on land and water, at the hoe, at the oar for bread.” In the course of two years, he was joined by others, who fled to his asylum. The land which was now occupied by Williams was within the territory of the Narraganset Indians; it was not long before all Indian deeds from Canonicus and Miantonomoh made him the undisputed possessor of an extensive dominion. Nothing displays more clearly the character of Roger Williams than the use which he made of his acquisition of territory. The soil he could claim as his “own, as truly as any man’s can,” but his back; and he reserved to himself not one foot of land, not one tittle of political power, more than he granted to servants and strangers.” “He gave away his lands and other estate to them, that he thought were fit men to live by him.” He chose to found a commonwealth in the universal forms of a pure democracy, where “the will of the majority should govern the State. Yet only in civil things; God alone was respected as the ruler of conscience; To their more aristocratic neighbours, it seemed as if these fugitives would have no magistrates, no regularly high laws, a wide and loose convention of the people. This first system has had its influence on the whole political history of Rhode Island; in no state in the world, not even in the agricultural state of Vermont, has the magistracy so little power or the representatives of the people so much. The annals of Rhode Island, if written in the spirit of philosophy, would exhibit the forms of society under a peculiar aspect; had the territory of the state corresponded to the importance and singularity of the principles of its early existence, the world would have been filled with wonder at the phenomena of its history.

The most touching trait in the founder of Rhode-Island was his conduct towards his persecutors. Though keenly sensitive to his hardships, which he had endured, he was far from harboring feelings of revenge towards those banished him, and only regretted their delusion. “I did ever, from my soul, honor and love them, even their judgment led them to afflict me.” In all his writings on the subject, he attacked the spirit of intolerance, the doctrine of persecution, and never his persecutors or the colony of Massachusetts. Indeed, we shall presently behold him requite their severity by exposing his life at their request and for their benefit. It is not strange, then, if “many hearts were touched with relentings. That great and pious soul, Mr. Winslow, melted and kindly visited me,” says he, “at our departure from Salem, to the hands of my wife, for our supply;” the founder, the legislator, the proprietor of Rhode Island, owed a shelter to the hospitality of an Indian chief; and his wife the means of sustenance to the charity of a stranger. The half-wise Cotton Mather concedes, that many judicious persons confessed him to have had the root of the matter in him; and his nearer friends, the immediate witnesses of his actions, declared him from “the whole course and tenor of his life and conduct to have been one of the most disinterested men that ever lived, a most pious and heavenly minded soul.”