Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have done what they could to
obscure the facts of the trial and banishment of Williams. It has been
argued by more than one writer that it was not a case of religious
persecution at all, but the exclusion of a man dangerous to the State.
Cotton, with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that Williams was
"enlarged" rather than banished. The case has even been pettifogged in
our own time by the assertion that the banishment was only the action
of a commercial company excluding an uncongenial person from its
territory. But with what swift indignation would the Massachusetts
rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes have repudiated a plea which
denied their magistracy! They put so strong a pressure on Stoughton,
who said that the assistants were not magistrates, that he made haste
to renounce his pride of authorship and to deliver his booklet to be
officially burned; nor did even this prevent his punishment. The
rulers of "the Bay" were generally frank advocates of religious
intolerance; they regarded toleration as a door set open for the Devil
to enter. Not only did they punish for unorthodox expressions, they
even assumed to inquire into private beliefs. Williams was only one of
scores bidden to depart on account of opinion.
The real and sufficient extenuation for the conduct of the
Massachusetts leaders is found in the character and standards of the
age. A few obscure and contemned sectaries--Brownists, Anabaptists,
and despised Familists--in Holland and England had spoken more or less
clearly in favor of religious liberty before the rise of Roger
Williams, but nobody of weight or respectable standing in the whole
world had befriended it. All the great authorities in Church and
State, Catholic and Protestant, prelatical and Puritan, agreed in
their detestation of it. Even Robinson, the moderate pastor of the
Leyden Pilgrims, ventured to hold only to the "toleration of tolerable
opinions." This was the toleration found at Amsterdam and in some
other parts of the Low Countries. Even this religious sufferance,
which did not amount to liberty, was sufficiently despicable in the
eyes of that intolerant age to bring upon the Dutch the contempt of
Christendom. It was a very qualified and limited toleration, and one
from which Catholics and Arminians were excluded. It seems to have
been that practical amelioration of law which is produced more
effectually by commerce than by learning or religion. Outside of some
parts of the Low Countries, and oddly enough of the Turkish Empire,
all the world worth counting decried toleration as a great crime. It
would have been wonderful indeed if Massachusetts had been superior to
the age. "I dare aver," says Nathaniel Ward, the New England
lawyer-minister, "that God doth nowhere in his Word tolerate Christian
States to give tolerations to such adversaries of his Truth, if they
have power in their hands to suppress them." To set up toleration was
"to build a sconce against the walls of heaven to batter God out of
his chair," in Ward's opinion.
This doctrine of intolerance was sanctioned by many refinements of
logic, such as Cotton's delicious sophistry that if a man refused to
be convinced of the truth, he was sinning against conscience, and
therefore it was not against the liberty of conscience to coerce him.
Cotton's moral intuitions were fairly suffocated by logic. He declared
that men should be compelled to attend religious service, because it
was "better to be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give God
part of his due, the outward man, but the profane person giveth God
neither outward nor inward man." To reason thus is to put subtlety
into the _cathedra_ of common-sense, to bewilder vision by
legerdemain. Notwithstanding his natural gift for devoutness and his
almost immodest godliness, Cotton was incapable of high sincerity. He
would not specifically advise Williams's banishment, but having
labored with him round a corner according to his most approved
ecclesiastical formula, he said, "We have no more to say in his
behalf, but must sit down;" by which expression of passivity he gave
the signal to the "secular arm" to do its worst, while he washed his
hands in innocent self-complacency. When one scrupulous magistrate
consulted him as to his obligation in Williams's case, Cotton answered
his hesitation by saying, "You know they are so much incensed against
his course that it is not your voice, nor the voice of two or three
more, that can suspend the sentence." By such shifty phrases he
shirked responsibility for the results of his own teaching. Of the
temper that stands alone for the right, nature had given him not a
jot. Williams may be a little too severe, but he has some truth when
he describes Cotton on this occasion as "swimming with the stream of
outward credit and profit," though nothing was further from Cotton's
conscious purpose than such worldliness. Cotton's intolerance was not
like that of Dudley and Endicott, the offspring of an austere temper;
it was rather the outgrowth of his logic and his reverence for
authority. He sheltered himself behind the examples of Elizabeth and
James I., and took refuge in the shadow of Calvin, whose burning of
Servetus he cites as an example, without any recoil of heart or
conscience. But the consideration of the character of the age forbids
us to condemn the conscientious men who put Williams out of the
Massachusetts theocracy as they would have driven the Devil out of the
garden of Eden. When, however, it comes to judging the age itself, and
especially to judging the Puritanism of the age, these false and harsh
ideals are its sufficient condemnation. Its government and its very
religion were barbarous; its Bible, except for mystical and
ecclesiastical uses, might as well have closed with the story of the
Hebrew judges and the imprecatory Psalms. The Apocalypse of John,
grotesquely interpreted, was the one book of the New Testament that
received hearty consideration, aside from those other New Testament
passages supposed to relate to a divinely appointed ecclesiasticism.
The humane pity of Jesus was unknown not only to the laws, but to the
sermons of the time. About the time of Williams's banishment the
lenity of John Winthrop was solemnly rebuked by some of the clergy and
rulers as a lax imperiling of the safety of the gospel; and Winthrop,
overborne by authority, confessed, explained, apologized, and promised
amendment. The Puritans substituted an unformulated belief in the
infallibility of "godly" elders acting with the magistrates, for the
ancient doctrine of an infallible Church.
In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold
Williams up to ridicule. Never was a noble and sweet-spirited man
bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial. Cotton aptly dubbed him "a
haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them
vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite
charity and a pathetic magnanimity: but in the midst of it all the
writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious
as the buzzing of mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In
dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes
the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month,
lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids
writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the
last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as
"52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting
words, or with the Latin "_ut vulgo_." What quarrel the tender
conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So too he
writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full
of reverential tenderness and hearty friendship. But his conscience
does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellowship with
a man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend. Once at least he
guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your worship's
faithful and affectionate in all _civil_ bonds." It would be sad to
think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time
and his party, if these minute restrictions had been a source of
annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems
rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were
to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a
well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist.
Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every
ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of
churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was the
mainspring of the High Church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the
aim of the Puritan, and still more the goal of the Separatist. One
party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had
trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own
age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of institutions that had
grown up in the ages, and in getting back to the primitive nakedness
of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature,
Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate
possibilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at
Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism
in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of
the great deep were utterly broken up, he could find no rest for the
soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the
Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism: he had now swung round to
where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for
apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without
apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the
last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker.
Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had
appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search
for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative
result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic
form unless they were sanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time.
The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the
religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a
resting-place for many a weather-beaten soul. As the miraculous gifts
were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they
merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to
be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to
know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan
movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism
and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of
literalism, until he had passed out on the other side into the region
of devout and contented uncertainty.
In all this, Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more
childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment
in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and
that not because of intellectual superiority,--for he had no large
philosophical views,--but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the
authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh
severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental
delusions about the character of the savages,--he styles them "wolves
endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane
treatment of them. All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not make
him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in
the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the
selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and
resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used
his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force
against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this
ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such
words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people
of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks, either in Rome or
England."
Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to
speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his
genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his
convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism,
he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in
spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time
yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a
clear-shining inward light, not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured
by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams.
In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled
him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly
emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.
This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness
constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and
Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach
of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled
them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they
consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like
other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge
or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely
here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing
of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah
the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet
unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever
shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the
seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a
John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not
belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the
politic founders of States, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his
own time; but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever
clearer as the ages go on.
Reprinted by consent of the author, and of D. Appleton &
Company, publishers, New York.