reporting the attack upon them in 1645, he should have used an
expressive word hitherto supposed to be very modern and American. He
says that the assault was made "by a party of 'rowdies' or marauders."
From the way in which the sentence is printed in the Records of the
Society of Jesus, iii, 387, I suppose that in the original manuscript
the English word "rowdies" is given and explained by a Latin
equivalent.
[Sidenote: Note 25, page 256.]
Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, writes in defense of the Maryland
policy of toleration under date of March 26, 1678: "That at the first
planteing of this Provynce of my ffather--Albeit he had an absolute
Liberty given to him and his heires to carry thither any Persons out
of any the Dominions that belonged to the Crown of England that should
be found Wylling to goe thither, yett when he comes to make use of
this Liberty He found very few who were inclyned to goe and seat
themselves in those parts But such as for some Reasons or other could
not Lyve with ease in other places, And of these a great parte were
such as could not conforme in all particulars to the severall Lawes of
England relateing to Religion. Many there were of this sort of people
who declared their Wyllingness to goe and Plant themselves In this
Provynce soe as they might have a generall toleracon settled there by
a Lawe by which all of all sorts that professed Christianity in
Generall might be at liberty to worship God in such manner as was most
agreeable with their respective Judgments and Consciences without
being Subject to any Penaltyes whatever for their soe doing." Colonial
Papers, vol. xlix, Record Office. Compare Leah and Rachel, p. 23,
where the author also implies that the Act of Toleration was a
concession to Puritan demands.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
_THE PROPHET OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM._
I.
[Sidenote: Centrifugal forces in Massachusetts.]
The centrifugal force of religious differences acted with disastrous
results in Maryland, because the Catholic party, which had always a
controlling negative there through the proprietary, was in the
minority. The Massachusetts people, on the other hand, were fairly
homogeneous in religious opinion, and their government was admirably
compacted. In Massachusetts religious sentiment was a powerful
centripetal force. Magistrates and ministers were nicely poised, and
each order relied upon the other to maintain existing conditions. If
the magistrates were perplexed or were seriously opposed, the elders
were called in to advise or to lend a powerful ecclesiastical sanction
to the rulers. When any disturbance of church order was threatened,
the magistrates came to the front and supported the clergy with the
sharp smiting of the secular arm. In the magistracy and in the ranks
of the clergy were men of unusual prudence and ability. If the little
Puritan commonwealth seemed a frail canoe at first, it was
navigated--considering its smallness one might rather say it was
paddled--most expertly. But in Massachusetts, as well as in Maryland,
religious opinion was the main source of disturbance. The
all-pervading ferment of the time could not be arrested, and more than
once it produced explosion. Now one and now another prophet of novelty
or prophet of retrogression arose to be dealt with for religious
errors; there were divergences from the strait path of Puritanism in
the direction of a return to Church of England usage, divergences in
the direction of extreme Separatism, in the direction of the
ever-dreaded "Anabaptism," in the direction of Arianism, and of
so-called Antinomianism. In the case of the Antinomians, the new
movement was able to shelter itself under the authority of the younger
Vane, then governor, and for a while under the apparent sanction of
the powerful Cotton. But no other religious disturbance was ever
allowed to gather head enough to become dangerous to the peace and
unity of the little state. Dislike as we may the principles on which
uniformity was enforced, we must admire the forehanded statesmanship
of the Massachusetts leaders in strangling religious disturbances at
birth, as Pharaoh's midwives did infant Hebrews.
II.
[Sidenote: Early life of Roger Williams.]
[Sidenote: N. Eng. Hist., Gen. Reg., July, 1889.]
[Sidenote: Indorsement of Mrs. Sadleir on Williams's letter,
transcript, Lenox Library; also in Narragansett Club, Pub. VI.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
One of the most formidable of all those who ventured to assail the
compact phalanx presented by the secular and religious authorities of
Massachusetts was Roger Williams. Williams was the son of a merchant
tailor of London. He manifested in boyhood that quickness of
apprehension which made him successful in acquiring languages later in
life. Before he was fifteen the precocious lad was employed in the
Star Chamber in taking notes of sermons and addresses in shorthand,
and his skill excited the surprise and admiration of Sir Edward Coke.
Coke had found time, in the midst of a tempestuous public career and
the arduous private studies that brought him permanent renown, to
defend the legacy which founded the new Sutton's Hospital, later known
as the Charter-House School. Of this school he was one of the
governors, and he appointed young Roger Williams to a scholarship
there, Williams being the second pupil that ever gained admission to
that nursery of famous men. His natural inclination to industry in his
studies was quickened by the example and encouragement of Coke, who
was wont to say that he who would harrow what Roger Williams had sown
must rise early. From the Charter House Williams went to Pembroke
College, Cambridge. He early manifested sincere piety and a tendency
to go to extremes in his Puritan scruples. Even in his father's house
he had begun to taste the bitterness of persecution. His eager temper
transformed his convictions into downright passions; his integrity was
an aggressive force, and there was a precipitation in his decisions
and actions that was trying to his friends. From an early period he
showed a conscience intolerant of prudent compromises. Puritanism had
contrived to exist and to grow to formidable strength within the
church by means of such compromises. Hooker and Cotton, two of the
greatest luminaries of that party and afterward the lights that
lightened New England, one day urged on the impetuous Williams the
propriety of temporarily conforming in the use of the common prayer.
By conceding so much to the judgment of his revered elders, Williams
would have removed the only obstacle to his advancement, for
preferment was offered to the clever and exemplary _protege_ of Coke
in the universities, in the city, in the country, and at court. But
neither interest nor example could sway the impractical young
minister. He took refuge, like other extreme Puritans, in a private
chaplaincy, and refused all compromise, in order, as he afterward
declared, to keep his "soul undefiled in this point and not to act
with a doubting conscience." Most men feel bound to obey conscience
only where it clearly commands or forbids; good men may act on the
balance of probabilities where there is doubt; but this young man
would not do anything concerning which his moral judgment felt the
slightest halting. Here is the key to his whole career; his strength
lay in his aspiration for a soul undefiled; his weakness, in that he
was ever a victim to the pampered conscience of an ultraist. Property
of some thousands of pounds, that might have been his had he been
willing to make oath in the form required in chancery, he renounced to
his scruples. It certainly seemed rash in a young man just setting
out in life, with a young wife to care for, to indulge in such
extravagant luxury of scruple.
III.
[Sidenote: Flight of Williams from England.]
[Sidenote: Williams's letter to Mrs. Sadleir, as above.]
Laud succeeded in hunting the non-conforming Puritans from their
lectureships and chaplaincies. It became with Williams no longer a
question of refusing preferments on both hands with lavish
self-denial, but of escaping the harsh penalties reserved for such as
he by the Courts of High Commission and the Star Chamber. There was
nothing left but to betake himself to New England for safety. He fled
hurriedly across country on horseback, feeling it "as bitter as death"
that he dared not even say farewell to his great patron Sir Edward
Coke, who detested schism.
[Sidenote: Arrival in New England.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
Here, as in after life, the supreme hardship he suffered was not mere
exile, but that exile of the spirit which an affectionate man feels
when he is excommunicate of those he loves. His escape by sea was
probably the more difficult because he was unwilling to "swallow down"
the oath exacted of those who emigrated. But he succeeded in sailing
with his young wife, and in 1631 this undefiled soul, this dauntless
and troublesome extremist, landed in New England. He was invited to
become one of the ministers of the Boston church. But Williams was
conscientiously a Separatist, and he refused to enter into communion
with the Boston congregation because of its position with reference to
the church in England.
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
This protest by withdrawal of communion was a fundamental principle of
Separatism. It was not, as it appears on the surface, a manifestation
of uncharitableness toward persons, but a solemn protest by act in
favor of a principle. Never was any man more forgiving,
long-suffering, and charitable toward opponents than Williams, but
never was a man less inclined to yield a single jot in the direction
of compromise where his convictions were involved, whatever might be
the evils sure to result from his refusal.
IV.
[Sidenote: Williams at Salem.]
[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 63, 12th April, 1631.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
Williams repaired first to Salem, the north pole of Puritanism, where
the pioneer church of Massachusetts had a more Separatist tone than
any other. In the phrase of the time, no other churches in the world
were so "pure" as the New England churches, and Salem was accounted
the "purest" church in New England. Its surviving minister, Skelton,
and its principal layman, Endecott, both tended to extreme
Congregationalism; but the General Court of the colony protested
against the selection of Williams to be one of the ministers of the
Salem church. Skelton's Separatist tendencies, Endecott's impetuous
radicalism, and Salem's jealous rivalry with the younger town of
Boston, were already sources of anxiety to the rulers. The addition of
Williams to these explosive forces was alarming. Williams's
ecclesiastical ideals were not those which the leaders of the colony
had devoted their lives and fortunes to establish. Had this young
radical been less conscientious, less courageous, less engagingly good
and admirable, there would not have been so much reason to fear him. A
letter was written to Endecott protesting against Williams's
ordination, because he had refused communion with the church at
Boston, and because he denied the power of the magistrate to enforce
duties of the first table--that is, duties of religion. Here at the
very outset of his American life we find that Williams had already
embraced the broad principle that involved the separation of church
and state and the most complete religious freedom, and had
characteristically pushed this principle to its logical result some
centuries in advance of the practice of his age. The protest of the
court prevented his ordination. He yielded to the opposition and soon
after removed to Plymouth, where the people were Separatists, modified
by the conservative teachings of John Robinson, somewhat modified also
by the responsibility of founding a new state, and perhaps by
association with Puritans of the neighboring colony.
[Sidenote: Williams at Plymouth.]
[Sidenote: Maverick's Description of New England, 25.]
[Sidenote: Williams to Winthrop, 1632.]
At Plymouth the young idealist "prophesied" in his turn, but did not
take office in the church, which already had a pastor in Ralph Smith,
the Separatist, who had been suffered to come over in a Massachusetts
ship only on his giving a promise not to preach in that jurisdiction
without leave. The congregation at Plymouth was poor, and Roger
Williams mainly supported himself by hard toil "at the hoe and the
oar"--that is, perhaps, in farming and fishing. His body seems to have
been vigorous, and no physical fatigue abated anything of his mental
activity. The Pilgrims had passed more than twelve years in Holland,
and almost every adult in Plymouth must have known Dutch. Those of
Roger Williams's own age, who were children when they migrated to
Leyden and men when they left, probably spoke it as well as they did
their mother tongue. The Plymouth people, indeed, were styled
"mungrell Dutch" a quarter of a century later. It is probable that
Williams, with his usual eagerness to acquire knowledge, now added
Dutch to his stock of languages; it is certain that he afterward
taught Dutch to John Milton. But he was still more intent on learning
the language of the natives, that he might do them good. He resolved
not to accept office as pastor or teacher, but to give himself to work
among the Indians. Perhaps his tendency to individualism made this
prospect pleasing to him. He may have begun already to realize in a
half-conscious way that there was scant room in any organization for
such as he. The learning of the Indian language was an arduous toil in
more ways than one. "God was pleased to give me a painful patient
spirit," wrote Williams long after, "to lodge with them in their
filthy, smoky holes to gain their tongue." He afterward wrote an
excellent treatise on the dialect of the New England Indians.
[Illustration: Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth.]
[Sidenote: Writes against the royal patents.]
[Sidenote: Bradford, 310.]
[Sidenote: Knowles's Life of Williams, 53.]
[Sidenote: Williams returns to Salem.]
At Plymouth Williams spoke, as he had at Salem, without restraint from
any motive of expediency or even of propriety. Separatist Plymouth,
whose days of advance were over, was a little disturbed by his speech.
In his own sweet, reckless way he sometimes sharply rebuked even the
revered Bradford when he thought him at fault. And in the interest of
the aborigines and of justice Williams laid before Governor Bradford a
manuscript treatise which argued that the king had no right to give
away, as he had assumed to do in his grants and charters, the lands of
the Indians merely because he was a Christian and they heathen. That
it was right to wrong a man because he was not orthodox in belief
could find no place in the thoughts of one whose conscience was wholly
incapable of sophistication. Bradford accepted candidly the rebukes of
Williams and loved him for his "many precious parts." But as governor
of a feeble colony he was disturbed by Williams's course. In
spirituality, unselfish fearlessness, and a bold pushing of Separatist
principles to their ultimate logical results, Roger Williams reminded
the Pilgrims of the amiable pastor of the Separatist church in
Amsterdam whose change step by step to "Anabaptism," the great bugbear
of theology in that time, had been a tragedy and a scandal to the
Separatists of Leyden. Elder Brewster feared that Williams would run
the same course. Williams wished to return to Salem, where he might
still devote himself to the neighboring Indians, and assist
Skelton, now declining in health. Brewster persuaded the Plymouth
church to give him a letter of dismissal. The leading Pilgrims felt
bound to send "some caution" to the Salem church regarding the extreme
tendencies of Williams. On the other hand, some of the Plymouth people
were so captivated by his teachings and his personal character that
they removed with him. This following of an approved minister was
common among Puritans; an acceptable preacher was of as much value to
a town as good meadows, broad pastures, and pure water.
V.
[Sidenote: The town system.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
To understand the brief career of Williams at Salem and its
catastrophe, we must recall the character of colonial life in
Massachusetts at the time. There were already sixteen settlements or
"towns" on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, with an indefinite stretch
of gloomy wilderness for background, the dwelling place of countless
savages and wild beasts. The population of all the settlements may
have summed up five thousand people--enough to have made one
prosperous village. The inhabitants of the various towns of the bay
were from different parts of England; their dress and dialect were
diverse, and their Puritanism was of various complexions. The town
system, at first a reproduction on new soil of the township field
communes that had subsisted in parts of England from ages beyond the
fountain heads of tradition, gave some play to local peculiarities
and prejudices. There is evidence that the central government relieved
itself from strain by means of this rural borough system. The ancient
town system in turn appears to have taken on a new youth; it was
perhaps modified and developed by the local diversity of the people,
and it lent to Massachusetts, at first, something of the elasticity of
a federal government.
[Sidenote: Life in the Massachusetts settlements.]
[Sidenote: 1630 to 1640.]
This community of scattered communes was cut off from frequent
intercourse with the world, for the sea was far wider and more to be
feared in that day of small ships and imperfect navigation than it is
now. The noise of the English controversies in which the settlers had
once borne a part reached them at long intervals, like news from
another planet. But most of the time these lonesome settlements had no
interest greater than the petty news and gossip of little forest
hamlets. The visitor who came afoot along Indian trails, or by water,
paddling in a canoe, to Boston on lecture day, might bring some news
of sickness, accident, or death. Sometimes the traveling story was
exciting, as that wolves had slaughtered the cattle at a certain
place, while yet cattle were few and precious. Or still more
distressing intelligence came that the ruling elder of the church at
Watertown had taken the High-church position that Roman churches were
Christian churches, or that democratic views had been advanced by
Eliot of Roxbury. A new and far-fetched prophetical explanation of a
passage in the Book of Canticles, and a tale of boatmen wrecked in
some wintry tempest, might divide the attention of the people. Stories
of boats capsized, of boatmen cast on islands where there was neither
shelter nor food, of boats driven far to sea and heard of no more,
were staples of excitement in these half-aquatic towns; and if the
inmates of a doomed boat had been particularly profane, these events
were accounted edifying--divine judgments on the ungodly. When the
governor wandered once and lost himself in the forest, passing the
night in a deserted wigwam, there was a sensation of a half-public
character. That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, and that
the puny mouse had triumphed at last, was in one budget of traveling
news that came to Boston. To this event an ominous significance was
given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, maker of anagrams,
solemn utterer of rhyming prophecies which were sometimes fulfilled,
and general theological putterer. Wilson made the snake represent the
devil, according to all sound precedents; the mouse was the feeble
church in the wilderness, to which God would give the victory over
Satan. Thus enhanced by an instructive interpretation from the prophet
and seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its travels once
more, and now with its hopeful exegesis on its back. The Massachusetts
mouse was an auspicious creature; it is recorded by the governor, and
it was no doubt told along the coast, that one got into a library and
committed depredations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling every
leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared a Greek Testament and
a Psalter in the same covers.
In a petty state with a range of intellectual interests so narrow, the
conflict between Williams and the General Court took place.
VI.
[Sidenote: Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced
the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God--the God who
led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that
they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers--the Dutch in
New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders,
with their admixture of papists--they looked with condescension if not
with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World. The
settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their
providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history;
that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin
world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church
that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of
foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that
the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands
of New England. The theocratical government was thought to be the one
most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into
this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked
that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off
image worship.
[Sidenote: John Cotton, 1633.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
The apostle of theocracy who arrived soon after Williams's return to
Salem was John Cotton, a Puritan leader in England, in whom
devoutness was combined with extreme discretion, a dominant will
with a diplomatic prudence and a temper never ruffled. Cotton's
ingenious refinements made him a valuable apologist in an age of
polemics, but they often served to becloud his vision of truth and
right. He was prone to see himself as he posed, in the character of
a protagonist of truth. He gave wise advice to the Massachusetts
Puritans at their departure from England. When, a few years later,
Laud's penetrating vigilance and relentless thoroughness made even
Cotton's well-balanced course of mild non-conformity impossible, he
fled from his parish of Boston, in Lincolnshire, to London, and
escaped in 1633 with difficulty to the new Boston in New England. As
John Cotton had been the shining candle of Puritanism in England,
his arrival in America was hailed with joy, and from the time of his
settlement in the little capital his was the hand that shaped
ecclesiastical institutions in New England, and he did much also to
mold the yet plastic state. Though he usually avoided the appearance
of personal antagonism, every formidable rival he had left
Massachusetts early. Williams, Hooker, Davenport, and Hugh Peter all
found homes beyond the bounds of the colony. There can not be two
queen bees in one hive, nor can there well be more than one master
mind in the ecclesiastical order of a petty theocratic state. It was
the paradox of colonial religious organization that the Episcopal
colonies had parishes almost independent of all supervision, while
the New England Congregationalists were, from the arrival of Cotton,
subject to the dominance of ministers who virtually attained to the
authority of bishops.
VII.
[Sidenote: Salem refractory.]
Salem, the oldest town of the commonwealth, was the most ready to
pursue an independent course and it was attached to Williams, whose
ability attracted new settlers and who maintained a position of
independence toward Cotton and the authorities at Boston. To subdue
the refractory Salem was no doubt one of the secondary purposes of the
proceedings against Williams. There seems to have been no personal
animosity toward Williams himself; his amiable character and his
never-doubted sincerity were main obstacles to his punishment.
[Sidenote: Collision inevitable.]
The return of Roger Williams to such a place as Salem was naturally a
matter of alarm to the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts.
Collision was not a matter of choice on either side. The catastrophe
was like one that comes from the irresistible action of physical
forces. In a colony planted at great cost to maintain one chosen form
of worship and subordinating all the powers of government to this
purpose, a preacher who asserted the necessity for a complete
separation of religion and government in the interest of soul liberty
had no place. His ideal was higher than the prevailing one, but that
age could not possibly rise to it.
VIII.
[Sidenote: The book against the patent.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
[Sidenote: Reply to Cotton, 276, 277.]
Williams was yet only a private member of the church in Salem, but in
the illness of the pastor he "exercised by way of prophecy"--that is,
preached without holding office. An alarming report was soon in
circulation that he had written a book against the king's patent, the
foundation of the colonial authority. This treatise, we have said, was
written in Plymouth for the benefit of Governor Bradford. Like many of
the manuscript books that have come down to us, it appears to have
been a small quarto, and, if it resembled other books of the sort, it
was neatly stitched and perhaps even bound by its author in the
favorite pigskin of the time. Williams sent his book promptly to be
examined. Some of the "most judicious ministers much condemned Mr.
Williams's error and presumption," and an order was made that he
"should be convented at the next court." In the charges no fault was
found with the main thesis of the book, that the king could not claim
and give away the lands of the Indians; but it was thought that there
were disloyal reflections cast upon both James and Charles--at least
those eager to condemn construed the obscure and "implicative phrases"
of Williams in that sense--and these supposed reflections were the
subject of the charges. Williams wrote a submissive letter, and
offered his book, or any part of it, to be burned after the manner of
that time. A month later, when the governor and council met, the whole
aspect of the affair had changed. Cotton and Wilson, the teacher and
the pastor of the Boston church, certified, after examination of
Williams's quarto, that "they found the matters not so evil as at
first they seemed." It was decided to let Williams off easily. There
are some things unexplained about the affair; the eagerness of the
"judicious ministers" and court to condemn without due examination,
the failure even to specify the objectionable passages at last, and
the unwonted docility of Williams--all leave one to infer that there
was more in this transaction than appears. Laud and his associates
were moving to have the Massachusetts charter vacated, and it may have
seemed imprudent for the magistrates to found their authority on a
base so liable to disappear. If the charter had been successfully
called in, Williams's ground of the sufficiency of the Indian title to
lands might have proved useful as a last resort. Williams asserted,
long afterward, that before his troubles began he had drafted a letter
addressed to the king, "not without the approbation of some of the
chiefs of New England," whose consciences were also "tender on this
point before God." This letter humbly acknowledged "the evil of that
part of the patent which relates" to the gift of lands. Had the letter
been sent to its destination it would have cut a curious figure among
the worldly-minded state papers of the time.
[Sidenote: An abstract principle.]
It is probable that most of the land of the colony had been secured
from the natives by purchase or by treaty of some sort; at least the
Indians were content, and the little quarto had at that time no
practical bearing whatever, but that did not matter to Williams. The
more abstract a question of right and wrong, the more he relished a
discussion of it. It was of a piece with his exquisite Separatism, a
mere standing up in the face of heaven and earth for an abstract
principle. His purpose was not to right a specific and concrete wrong,
for there had been none, but to assert as a broad principle of
everlasting application that a Christian king may not dispose of the
land owned by heathens merely because of his Christianity. Williams
was not a judge or a lawgiver; he was a poet in morals, enamored of
perfection, and keeping his conscience purer than Galahad's.
IX.
[Sidenote: The alarm.]
[Sidenote: 1634.]
It was in the winter of 1633-'34 that the book about the patent was
called in question. Skelton, pastor of Salem, died in the following
August, and the Salem people, in spite of an injunction from the
magistrates, made Williams their teacher in his stead. The country was
now full of alarm at news from England that the charter was to be
revoked, that a general governor of New England was to be appointed,
and that a force was to be sent to support his authority. Laud was put
at the head of a commission for the government of the colonies in
April, 1634. There could be no doubt of the meaning of this measure.
For more than a year the alarm in Massachusetts continued. The
ministers were consulted regarding the lawfulness of resistance to
force. A platform was constructed on the northeast side of Castle
Island, and a fortified house was proposed to defend the platform. The
trainbands were drilled, muskets, "bandeleroes" or cartridge belts,
and rests were distributed to the several towns, and pikemen were
required to learn to use the cumbrous musket of the time. Puritans in
England, angry that Laud, the new archbishop and old persecutor,
should stretch a long arm to America, sent powder and cannon to their
co-religionists, the object of whose military vigilance could easily
be covered by dangers from the savages, from the French, or from the
Spaniards.
[Sidenote: Debates not appeased.]
But these assiduous preparations, under the supervision of a military
commission which had "power of life and limb," did not abate in the
least the discussion of questions of doctrine and casuistry.
Refinements of theology were quite as real and substantial to the
Puritan mind as trainbands and fortifications. Sound doctrine and a
scrupulous observance of the "ordinances" conciliated God; they were
indeed more important elements of public safety than drakes and
demi-culverins.
[Sidenote: Reform in dress.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Records, 3d September, 1634.]
[Sidenote: Compare Ward's Simple Cobbler, _passim_.]
The General Court of September, 1634, undertook to provide for the
public safety in both respects. Along with regulations and provisions
of a military nature, it set out to remove those flagrant sins that
had provoked the divine wrath. The wearing of silver, gold, and rich
laces, girdles, and hatbands was forbidden; slashed clothes were also
abolished, "other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the
back"; ruffs and beaver hats, which last were apparently a mark of
dudishness, were not to be allowed. Long hair and other fashions
"prejudicial to the general good" were done away with in this hour of
penitence. Men and women might wear out the clothes they had, except
their "immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparel, immoderate great
rayles, long wings," which were to go at once without reprieve or
ceremony. The use of tobacco, socially and in public, or before
strangers was made an offense. If taken secretly or medicinally, the
Court did not take cognizance of it.
X.
[Sidenote: The fast-day sermon.]
[Sidenote: 1634.]
Seeing that the millinery sins recounted in this act had cried to
Heaven, and that, beside the danger from England, there was the desire
of Hooker's party to remove to the Connecticut, and a dissension
concerning the power of the Upper House that threatened trouble, the
Court appointed the 18th of September a solemn fast-day, hoping by
repentance, prayer, and the penance of hunger to avert the manifold
disasters that threatened them. Roger Williams was sure to speak like
a prophet on such an occasion. He did not stop at slashed garments,
great sleeves, and headdresses with long wings; he preached on eleven
"public sins" that had provoked divine wrath. We have no catalogue
left us. The list may have included some of those amusing scruples
that he held in common with other Puritans, or some of those equally
trivial personal scruples that Williams cherished so fondly. But no
sermon of his on public sins could fail to contain a declaration of
his far-reaching and cherished principle of religious freedom,
including perhaps a round denunciation of the petty inquisition into
private opinion which had been set up in Massachusetts. The Sabbath
law, the law obliging men to pay a tax to support religious worship,
the requirement that all should attend religious worship under
penalty, and the enforcement of a religious oath on irreligious and
perhaps unwilling residents, the assumption of the magistrate to
regulate the orthodoxy of a church under the advice of the ministers,
were points of Massachusetts law and administration that he denounced
at various times; and some of them, if not all, were no doubt put in
pillory in this fast-day sermon in the early autumn of 1634. Judged
by modern standards, the sermon may have had absurdities enough, but
it was no doubt a long way in advance of the General Court's mewling
about lace, and slashes, and long hair, and other customs "prejudicial
to the general good." To this sermon, whatever it was, Williams
afterward attributed the beginning of the troubles that led to his
banishment.
XI.
[Sidenote: Williams dealt with ecclesiastically.]
[Sidenote: Note 10.]
Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had
been superseded in the governorship by Dudley, open and zealous
advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always
hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher"
of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the
ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among
Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a
complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at
least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and
from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure
uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not
orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, entitled as such to
be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of
the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's
"violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than
from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him
by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a
conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. Dudley,
impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were
deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of
them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed
by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual
church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might
remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could
appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to
Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.
[Sidenote: The governor's verse.]
It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly against the Salem
heretic was thus foiled by Cotton's prudent and intricate orderliness
in procedure that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is happily the
only example of his verse that has survived:
[Sidenote: Eliot's New England Biography, 156, 157.]
Let men of God in courts and churches watch
O'er such as do a toleration hatch,
Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice
To poison all with heresy and vice.
If men be left and otherwise combine,
My epitaph's I die no libertine.
XII.
[Sidenote: Note 11.]
The most substantial grievance of the rulers against Williams was his
opposition to "the oath." In order to make sure of the loyalty of the
residents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity to be taken by
residents had been promulgated. Practical men are wont to put aside
minor scruples in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew-bread
when he is famishing: but Williams would rather starve than mumble a
crumb of it. He did not believe in enforced oaths; they obliged the
wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded the soul's freedom.
Cotton says that Williams's scruples excited such an opposition to the
oath that the magistrates were not able to enforce it. He thus
unwittingly throws a strong light on the weakness of the age, and
extenuates the conduct of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The
age was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this side was the
product of his time. In such an age a scruple-maker of ability and
originality like Williams might be a source of danger.
[Sidenote: Scruples small and great.]
During the year following Williams was several times "convented"
before the Court. He was charged with having broken his promise not to
speak about the patent, with opposing the residents' oath, with
maintaining certain scruples in opposition to the customs of the
times, as that a man should not return thanks after a meal, or call on
an unregenerate child to give thanks for his food. These were not
more trivial certainly than half a hundred scruples then prevalent,
but they chanced to be unfashionable--a damning fault in a scruple.
The sense of proportion was feeble in religionists of that day, and
neither Williams nor his opponents understood the comparative
magnitude of his greater contentions, and the triviality of those
petty scruples about which, like the whole Puritan world, he was very
busy. Religious freedom and the obligation of grace after meat could
then be put into the same category. As years went by, although the
mind of Williams was never disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to
see clearly what was the real battle of his life. No better fortune
can befall a great spirit than such a clarification of vision. The
extended works of Williams's later life are written mainly to
overthrow the "bloody tenent of persecution." It was this championship
of soul liberty as the weightiest matter of the law that lifted him
above all others who paid tithes of their little garden herbs.
[Sidenote: Williams inflexible.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 81.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., i, 135, 136.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., i, 156, 157. Winthrop's Journal, i, 194.]
Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder
of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the
remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of
the Roman churches. Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle,
advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced.
Stoughton, who had denied that the "assistants" of a corporation were
scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he
retracted. Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last.
The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its
ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leadership,
protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of
spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were
now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic
violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem. He
was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift
conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the
same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and
Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the
heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the
"rockie strength" of his opinions in spite of penalties and
majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first
blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the
commonwealth.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Williams's trial.]
[Sidenote: Note 12.]
Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, incorrigible offender.
Eliot, Stoughton, and Endecott, and even Williams's fellow-elder,
Sharpe, and the whole church at Salem, might be argued into conformity
by the sharp dialectics of the clergy, or bullied out of their
convictions by the sharper logic of the magistrates, but Roger
Williams could not be overborne. Individualist in his very nature, his
self-reliant spirit was able to face isolation or excommunication.
The great Hooker was set to dispute with him. Hooker's refined
arguments were drawn out by inferences linked to inferences. He proved
to the satisfaction of everybody but the culprit that it was not
lawful for Williams, with his opinions, to set food before his
unregenerate child, since he did not allow an irreligious child to go
through the form of giving thanks. But the wire-drawn logic of Hooker,
though Williams could not always answer it, had no more influence with
him than the ingenious sophistications of the pious Cotton; Williams
constantly fell back upon the "rockie strength" of his principles. On
the 9th of October, 1635, he was sentenced to banishment. After the
manner of that curious age, his banishment was based on charges of
great importance mixed with charges utterly trivial. His denial of the
authority of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of the churches
and the belief of individuals is, however, made one of the cardinal
offenses in all the trustworthy accounts given at the time. With this
were joined in the proceedings, but not in the sentence, such things
as the denial of the propriety of grace after meat. All the elders but
one advised his banishment.
[Sidenote: Williams banished.]
[Sidenote: Note 13.]
[Sidenote: Note 14.]
[Sidenote: Note 15.]
[Sidenote: Note 16.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 209, 210.]
The magistrates, though deeply "incensed" against him, probably felt
at the last some reluctance to banish such a man. Six weeks were
accorded him in which to leave. Winthrop, who was Williams's friend,
and who seems to have been loath to consent to his banishment, wrote
to him to "steer his course for Narragansett Bay," where there was
territory beyond the bounds of Massachusetts and Plymouth. The forest
journeys or boat voyages to Boston and back, the bitter controversies
there, and the uproar of indignation which was produced in Salem by
the news of the verdict, the desertion of Williams by Endecott,
convinced by force, and by Sharpe, the ruling elder, who had been also
dealt with, the natural yielding of the Salem church after a while to
the pressure from the General Court, and to the desire of the townsmen
to secure the lands at Marble Neck, put a strain on Williams which,
added to his necessary toil in the field, broke his health and he fell
ill. The General Court probably also felt the recoil of its act. When
six weeks had expired consent was given that Williams should remain
during the winter provided he would refrain from preaching. But
Williams was in Salem, and in Salem he was the center of
interest--just now he was the center of explosion. It was impossible
for the great Separatist to be silent. A few faithful friends,
come-outers like himself, clave to him and repudiated as he did
communion with the church at Salem, which could condone the offenses
of the magistrates for the sake of "these children's toys of land,
meadows, cattle, and government." These fellow-Separatists, some of
whom perhaps had removed from Plymouth out of love for this unworldly
saint, loved him none the less for his courage and his sorrows. They
frequented his house on Sunday as he convalesced. Indeed, the
attachment to him was so great that the "ordinances" which had been
appointed by the magistrates and enforced on Salem as the price of the
common land on Marble Neck, were neglected and almost deserted.
Williams could not refrain from speech with this concourse of
visitors, and at length word came to Boston that more than twenty
persons had definitely adhered to the opinions of their former
teacher, unconvinced by the argument of the rod of justice applied to
Endecott and Sharpe, or by the valuable land on Marble Neck. These
disciples proposed to remove in the spring with Williams to the shores
of Narragansett Bay. This might meet the approval of the sagacious and
kindly Winthrop, who had directed Williams's attention to that
promising place, and who foresaw perhaps the usefulness of such a man
in the dangerous Indian crisis now threatening the colony. But to
devotees of uniformity, the prospect of a community on the very border
of the land of the saints tolerating all sorts of opinionists was
insufferable. When once the civil government weights itself with
spiritual considerations, its whole equilibrium is disturbed. Liberty
and justice seem insignificant by the side of the immensities. The
magistrates, or a part of them, were alarmed at the prospect of a
settlement of the followers of Williams at Narragansett Bay, "whence
the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people
being, many of them, much taken with an apprehension of his
godliness." It was therefore agreed to send him to England on a ship
soon to sail.
XIV.
[Sidenote: Escape to the Indians.]
The hardships of such a voyage in midwinter in his state of health
might prove fatal, and his arrival in England would almost certainly
deliver him into the hands of Laud. But what is justice or mercy when
the welfare of churches and the rescue of imperiled souls is to be
considered? A warrant was dispatched ordering him to Boston within a
certain time. Probably knowing what was in store for him, he protested
that it would be dangerous for him, in view of his health, to make the
journey, and some of the Salem people went to Boston in his behalf,
and, as was natural in the circumstances, made exaggerated
representations regarding his physical condition. But the magistrates
had other information. They sent the valiant and notorious Captain
Underhill, in whom were mingled about equally devoutness, military
courage, and incorrigible lewdness, to bring Williams by sea in a
shallop. Williams was probably informed of their purpose, for, while
Underhill in his little craft was beating up to Salem in wintry seas
on an errand so congenial, expecting perhaps to come upon his quarry
unawares, Williams was fleeing from one hamlet of bark wigwams to
another. Here among the barbarians he was sure of faithful friends and
secure concealment. Underhill found on his arrival that the culprit
had disappeared three days before he got there, and nobody in Salem,
that could, would tell whither the fugitive had gone.
[Sidenote: Williams founds Providence.]
Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure of speech, "steering his
course" "in winter snow" toward Narragansett Bay. "I was sorely tossed
for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," he says, in his
vivid and hyperbolic fashion of speech, "not knowing what bed or bread
did mean." He began one settlement on the eastern bank of the Seekonk
River after getting land from the Indians, but his old enemies the
royal patents now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of Plymouth, a
kind-hearted, politic man, the one born diplomatist of New England,
warned him that he was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked him to
remove to the other side of the water, because they "were loath to
displease the Bay." It was not enough to drive a heretic from the
bounds of Massachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the time would
have expelled him from the continent had its arm been long enough.
Williams had already begun to build and to plant, but he removed once
more to the place which he named Providence. He planted the germinal
settlement of the first state in the world that founded religious
liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to the law no
cognizance whatever of religious beliefs or conduct where the "civil
peace" was not endangered.
[Illustration: The early settlements on Narragansett Bay.]
XV.
[Sidenote: Williams's banishment an act of persecution.]
[Sidenote: Note 17.]
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.
[Sidenote: Intolerance as a virtue.]
[Sidenote: Note 18.]
[Sidenote: Note 19.]
[Sidenote: Simple Cobbler of Agawam, pp. 3 and 6.]
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 no where 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.
XVI.
[Sidenote: The casuistry of Cotton.]
[Sidenote: Note 20.]
[Sidenote: Hutchinson Papers, 496.]
[Sidenote: Note 21.]
[Sidenote: Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience.]
[Sidenote: Character of Puritanism.]
[Sidenote: Note 22.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 211-214.]
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 Endecott, 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.
XVII.
[Sidenote: Character of Williams. His scruples.]
[Sidenote: New England Firebrand Quenched, 246.]
[Sidenote: Williams to Winthrop, 1637, Narr. Club, vi.]
[Sidenote: Note 23.]
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 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
the 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.
[Sidenote: Williams becomes a Seeker.]
[Sidenote: Note 24.]
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.
[Sidenote: The Seekers.]
Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had
appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search
for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative
result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic
form unless they 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 weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts
were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they
merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to
be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to
know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan
movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism
and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism
until he had passed out on the other side into the region of devout
and contented uncertainty.
XVIII.
[Sidenote: Moral elevation of Williams]
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."
[Sidenote: Superior to the age.]
Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to
speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his
genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his
convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism
he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in
spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time
yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a
clear-shining inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured
by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams.
In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled
him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly
emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.
[Sidenote: His prophetic character.]
This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness
constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and
Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach
of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled
them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they
consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like
other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge
or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely
here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing
of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah
the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet
unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever
shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the
seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a
John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not
belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the
politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his
own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever
clearer as the ages go on.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 268.]
Sir William Martin, an early friend of Williams, describes him as
passionate and precipitate, but with integrity and good intentions.
Hutchinson Papers, 106. See also, for example, the two letters of
Williams to Lady Barrington, in New England Genealogical Register,
July, 1889, pp. 316 and following.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 269.]
Letter to John Cotton the younger, 25th March, 1671. "He knows what
gains and preferments I have refused in universities, city, country
and court," etc. Williams's enthusiastic nature gave a flush of color
to his statement of ordinary fact, the general correctness of which,
however, there is never reason to doubt.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 270.]
Letter to John Cotton the younger, Narragansett Club Publications, vi,
356. There is no account of this event elsewhere, but the church
records of that early date are imperfect, and there is every reason to
accept the circumstantial statement of Williams. That he refused to
enter into membership with the church is confirmed by Winthrop's
Journal, 12th April, 1631, and such refusal must have had some such
occasion.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 271.]
"We have often tried your patience, but could never conquer it," were
Winthrop's words to Williams, who gave to Massachusetts lifelong
service in return for its lifelong severity toward him. The sentence
is quoted in Williams's letter to the younger Cotton, cited above,
which is itself a fine example of his magnanimity of spirit.
Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 351-357.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 272.]
There is difference of opinion on this point, but certain words of
Williams himself seem to bear on it. After his retirement from Salem
to Plymouth he received a letter from Winthrop, which appears to have
intimated that no man under twenty-five ought to be ordained. Williams
explains in reply that he is "nearer upwards of thirty than
twenty-five," but avers, "I am no elder in any church ... nor ever
shall be, if the Lord please to grant my desires that I may intend
what I long after, the natives souls." Williams's Letter, Narragansett
Club Publications, vi, 2. Of course, these words might have been
written if he had resigned the eldership before leaving Salem, but
they would have had much less pertinency.
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 276.]
Mr. Straus, in his Life of Roger Williams, says aptly that
Massachusetts was under a government of congregations rather than of
towns, since only church members could vote. A fuller discussion of
the source and evolution of the town system is deferred to a later
volume of this series.
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 278.]
David Pieterzen de Vries, in his Voyages, reports this feeling of
superiority as freely expressed at Hartford in 1639. There is a quaint
humor in what he says of it that is enhanced by the naive Dutch phrase
in which it is set down: "Dit Volck gaven haer uyt det sy Israeliten
waren, ende dat wy aen onse colonie Egyptenaren waren, end' Engelsen
inde Vergienies waren mede Egyptenaren," p. 151.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 279.]
"And such was the authority ... Mr. Cotton had in the hearts of the
people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an
Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church,
if of an ecclesiastical concernment." Hubbard, History of
Massachusetts, 182.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 281.]
Knowles's Life of Williams, 58, note, quotes from a letter of
Coddington's appended to Fox's reply to Williams, in which Coddington,
who was one of the magistrates that examined the treatise, charges
Williams with having "written a quarto against the King's patent and
authority."
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 288.]
Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38. I have followed Cotton
implicitly here, but without feeling sure that his memory can ever be
depended on where his polemical feeling is concerned. On the next page
he is guilty of a flagrant but no doubt unconscious suppression of an
important fact. "It pleased the Lord to open the hearts of the Church
to assist us," etc., he says, putting out of sight the sharp dealing
by which the Salem church was brought to ignominious subjection.
[Sidenote: Note 11, page 289.]
Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Massachusetts Records of
4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement to take the oath is
offered by making the regulations for recording the lands of freemen
apply also to the lands of "residents" presumably not church members
and ineligible to the franchise, but only to the residents "that had
taken or shall hereafter take their oathes." Backus supposes that
Williams saw some incidental result from the oath that would be
prejudicial to religious freedom. This is to suppose that Williams
needed a practical consideration to stir him to action--it is to
suppose that Williams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the
independence of Massachusetts would be lost; Roger Williams was only
afraid that Massachusetts would commit a public sin in trying to
escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled was his objective
point in private and public life; safety, public or private, was
secondary.
[Sidenote: Note 12, page 292.]
There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by Cotton
first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court since, to
prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a cause of his
banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, the decree would
have been more comprehensible and defensible in view of the opinions
of the age. But the question about the validity of the patent, the
question of the protest written against the course of the magistrates
in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to support him, the question of
the freeman's oath, and, what seems to have been deemed of capital
importance, the question of grace after meat, are all involved at one
time or another. The formal charges in what may be considered the
beginning of the banishment proceedings, the trial in July, as given
by Winthrop, our most trustworthy authority, are: 1. That the
magistrates ought not to punish for a religious offense--"the breach
of the first table"--except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2.
That the magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate
man. 3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 4.
That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after meat.
Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings in October,
the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to Salem its
outlying land entered into and embittered the controversy. Winthrop,
i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the divulging "of dyvers newe and
dangerous opinions against the aucthoritie of the magistrate" the
first offense, and the "letter of defamacion" the second. Williams
says that a magistrate, who appears to have been Haynes, the governor,
summed up his offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four
heads: 1. The denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of
the lawfulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray.
3. The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in
England. 4. The doctrine "that the Civill Magistrates' power extends
only to the Bodies and Goods and outward State of men." Against the
evidence of Williams, Winthrop, and the records, I can not attach any
importance to the halting accounts given years afterward, for
controversial purposes, by Cotton, from what he thought was his
memory.
[Sidenote: Note 13, page 292.]
"Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church at Salem,
hath broached and dyvulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions, against
the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also writt letters of defamacion
both of the magistrates & Churches here, & that before any conviccion,
& yet maintaineth the same without retraccion, it is therefore ordered
that the said Mr. Williams shall departe out of this jurisdiccion
within sixe weekes now nexte ensueing, which if hee neglect to
performe it shall be lawfull for the Gouernour & two of the
magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccion, not to
returne any more without license from the Court." Massachusetts
Records, i, 161.
[Sidenote: Note 14, page 293.]
Neal's History of New England, i, 143. "Sentence of banishment being
read against Mr. Williams, the whole town of Salem was in an uproar;
for such was the Popularity of the Man and such the Compassion of the
People ... that he would have carried off the greatest part of the
Inhabitants of the Town if the Ministers of Boston had not
interposed." Neal appears to derive these facts, which wear a
countenance of probability, from an authority not now known.
[Sidenote: Note 15, page 293.]
The phrase occurs in Williams's noble letter to Major Mason, 1st
Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, i, 275 and following.
The magnanimity shown toward those opposed to him in this letter is
probably without a parallel in his age; it has few in any age.
[Sidenote: Note 16, page 294.]
"The increase of the concourse of people to him on the Lord's days in
private, to the neglect or deserting of publick Ordinances and to the
spreading of the Leaven of his corrupt imaginations, provoked the
Magistrates rather than to breed a winters Spirituale plague in the
Countrey, to put upon him a winter's journey out of the Countrey."
Master John Cotton's Answer to Master Roger Williams, 57.
[Sidenote: Note 17, page 297.]
The main original authorities on the banishment of Williams are
Winthrop's Journal and the Massachusetts Records of the period. Some
facts can be gathered from the writings of Williams, whose
autobiographical passages always have an air of truth while they are
sometimes vague and often flushed by his enthusiastic temper.
Cotton's memory is less to be trusted; some of his statements are in
conflict with better authorities. He no doubt believed himself to be
truthful, but his ingenious mind was unable to be precise without
unconscious sophistication. Hubbard was of Presbyterian tendencies and
totally opposed to all forms of Separatism. He appears to have
recorded every exaggerated rumor cherished by Williams's antagonists
to his discredit. Neither in this nor in other matters can we rely
much on Hubbard's testimony. No critical student of history puts
unquestioning confidence in Cotton Mather. His strange mind could
never utter truth unvarnished. In a case like this, where family
pride, local feeling, and sectarian prejudice were all on one side,
and where he had a chance to embroider upon traditions already two
generations old, it is better to disregard the author of the Magnalia
entirely. Bentley's Historical Account of Salem, in 1st Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections, vi, is a paper that excites admiration
for its broadmindedness. It contains information not elsewhere to be
found, but it is impossible to tell how far Bentley depended upon
sources not now accessible and how far he relied on ingenious
inferences drawn from his large knowledge of local history. The
publications of the Narragansett Club contain the whole controversy
between Cotton and Williams and all the letters of the latter now
known to be extant. I have in some cases referred to the originals, in
others I have used these careful reprints. Williams has been rather
fortunate in his biographers. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, approaching the
subject from a fresh standpoint, has produced the latest Life of
Williams, written in a judicial temper and evincing a rare sympathy
with its subject. The character of Williams has never been better
drawn than by Mr. Straus, pp. 231-233. The life by T. D. Knowles is
perhaps the best of the older biographies, Arnold's History of Rhode
Island contains a sketch of Williams, and Elton's brief biography has
a value of its own. Gammell's Life in Sparks's Biography is generally
fair. "As to Roger Williams," by the late Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, is,
what it pretends to be, a partisan statement of the case against
Williams. It shows characteristic thoroughness of research, it clears
up many minor points, and is as erudite as it is one-sided.
[Sidenote: Note 18, page 298.]
Baylie's Sermon before the House of Lords, on Errours and Induration,
accuses the Dutch of mere worldly policy in toleration. Williams
alludes to the charge, Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 8. But the
toleration of Holland may rather be traced to that decay of bigotry
and that widening of view which are beneficent results of an extended
trade. Williams in the Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 10, complains
of the exclusion of Catholics and Arminians from toleration in the
Netherlands. It would carry us beyond the range of the present work to
inquire how far the toleration of Amsterdam was related to that
"meridian glory" which Antwerp reached as early as 1550 by making
itself a place of refuge for the persecuted of England, France, and
Germany. The Articles of Union, adopted at Utrecht in 1579, which have
been often called the Magna Charta of the Dutch, go to show that
political and commercial considerations counted in favor of
toleration, but they also show that some notion of the sacredness of
the free conscience had been adopted among the Dutch. Article XIII of
the Union provides that the states of Holland and Zealand shall
conduct their religious affairs as they think good. More qualified
arrangements are made for the other states, as that they may restrict
religious liberty as they shall find needful for the repose and
welfare of the country. But this significant provision is added, that
every man shall have freedom of private belief without arrest or
inquisition: "Midts dat een yder particulier in syn Religie vry zal
moghen blyven, ende dat men niemandt, ter cause van de Religie, zal
moghen achterhalen, ofte ondersoecken." Pieter Paulus Verklaring der
Unie van Utrecht, i, 229, 230. Compare Van Meteren, Nederlandsche
Historie etc., iii, 254, 255, and Hooft Nederlandsche Historie, etc.,