I
Other ideals than those of Winthrop and Cotton, fruitful or feculent
according to the special bias of whoever judges them, came out of
England in the teeming days of the Puritan revolution to agitate
the little settlements. A Hebraized theocracy could not satisfy the
aspirations of advanced English liberals who were exploring all the
avenues to freedom, and who, now that the old feudal bonds were
loosening, were projecting a more generous basis for the reorganization
of society. The democratic elements were beginning to make their voices
heard in England; the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was
bearing fruit in the minds of obscure Independents; and the eventual
outcome would be the shouldering aside of a snug Presbyterian order,
and the clarification of a program for a democratic commonwealth. In
those excellent words commonweal and commonwealth--words much on men’s
tongues in the creative later years of the Puritan revolution--was
fittingly summed up the political ideal of Independency. English
liberalism had come to believe that social conformity, established in
the practice of coercion, with its monarchical state and hierarchical
church, must give way to an order founded in good will, that conceived
of the political state as a public-service corporation, concerned
solely with the _res publica_, or public thing, careful of the
well-being of all, allowing special rights or grants to none. The
state, it was coming to be argued freely, rightly understood, was
no other than society organized to further the great end of the
commonweal; no longer must it remain a private preserve for gentlemen
to hunt over.
But before that should come about a great battle must be fought, in
New England as well as in old England. The principle of individual
freedom must first be established securely in the public mind, and
to that business the party of Independents devoted its energies. In
the theory and practice of Independency two fundamental rights were
implied: the right of the individual to determine his own belief,
uncoerced by external authority; and the right to join freely with his
fellows in the institutional expression and spread of such belief.
In order to realize the first, it was a necessary preliminary to
establish the right of free inquiry on a firm constitutional basis--the
principle that the state shall safeguard the citizen in the exercise
of such right, and not hinder or thwart him; and in order to realize
the second, it was necessary to establish in social practice a much
more fiercely disputed principle, namely, the right to proselytize,
to spread one’s views freely, to endeavor to make them prevail over
contrary views. Certainly neither right would be freely granted; they
must be won in the teeth of supposedly divine sanctions to conformity.
However intimately the two are related, it is over the second that the
long fierce battle has been waged in modern history. Liberalism faces
no severer test than in its attitude towards the right of unpopular
minority propaganda. The broad principle of toleration of differences,
so vital to a democratic society, searches out and lays bare every
insincerity of liberal professions. The will to power is so universal
in appeal, it is so quick to attack every threatening nonconformity,
that no other social right has traveled so arduous a road, or lags so
far in the rear of the liberal advance. The principle of religious
toleration that was involved in the movement of Independency was the
ecclesiastical form of a struggle, which, shifting later to the field
of politics and then to economics, is still raging about us. The long
battle is still far from being won. In few countries today do more than
a small minority regard the principle of toleration otherwise than as a
social luxury to be indulged in only when times are settled.
It was in the nature of things that a clash should soon come in
Massachusetts Bay. There Independency would certainly be looked
upon as no better than a weed from the devil’s wilderness, and in
the name of God and the theocracy it would be trampled under foot.
Liberalism and the Cambridge Platform would no more mix than oil and
water. But the more immediate and narrower question of religious
toleration was only incidental to the broader divergencies that lay
in antagonistic principles of church and state, and that brought on
the clash. A general engagement was preparing between the principles
of Presbyterianism and Independency, and the real issue at stake
was the future form of society in New England--whether it was to be
aristocratic or democratic. The free environment was a strong stimulus
to idealists who looked upon the new field as a heaven-sent opportunity
for their own special Utopias to take root, and who would bitterly
resent any intrusion by a rival. Commonwealth building is a great
adventure, and the Independents with their carefully elaborated plans
would not sit quietly by and permit the Saints to preëmpt the land for
their inhospitable theocracy without a struggle. In such a contest the
more liberal party was fortunate in its leaders. Thomas Hooker and
Roger Williams were men of creative ability, of inflexible purpose,
of fine idealism, the ablest amongst the entire group of Puritan
immigrants, in whom the great principles of Independency found worthy
stewards; and the long struggle they carried on, each in his own way,
with the theocratic leaders of Massachusetts was to affect profoundly
the later development of New England. In the end the Presbyterianism
of Boston was to surrender to the Congregationalism of Hartford. From
Connecticut and Rhode Island, it must be recalled, rather than from the
Bay colony, came those democratic principles and institutions that were
to spread widely in later years, and create the New England that after
generations have liked to remember.
II • Thomas Hooker • Puritan Liberal
Among the Englishmen who came to Massachusetts were some to whom the
“New England way” seemed to promise a democratic organization of
the church, and who looked with disapproval upon the Presbyterizing
policy of the oligarchy. Of this number the congregations of Newtown,
Dorchester, and Watertown were noteworthy for the quiet determination
with which they seceded from the theocratic commonwealth, and set
up for themselves in the Connecticut wilderness. Their leaders were
liberals who believed that everything should be done decently and
in order, but who were determined that the outcome of such decent
orderliness should be a free church in a free state; and so while Roger
Williams was engaged in erecting the democracy of Rhode Island, Thomas
Hooker was as busily engaged in erecting the democracy of Hartford.
Concerning the “grave and judicious Hooker” surprisingly little is
known, in spite of the important work that he did and the influence
that he wielded during a masterful life. He was evidently a man
regardless of fame, who took small pains to publish his virtues for the
edification of posterity; what record he left behind bears evidence of
being the expression of a man to whom desire for celebrity was nothing
in comparison with the needs of his Master’s work. Unlike his fellow
ministers he was not much given to making books. The works that bore
the name of Thomas Hooker on the title-page were put through the press
usually by other hands than his, and were taken from shorthand notes.
His great contribution, _A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_,
published anonymously and in an imperfect form, was written against
his will in consequence of his having been drafted for the service
by his fellow ministers. In removing from Newtown he cut himself off
from the group of diarists who diligently recorded the happenings of
the day, and so failed of being portrayed and praised by divers busy
pens. Lacking exacter information, we are forced to rely mainly upon
such hearsay reports as have come down to us, pieced out by Puritan
tradition; and these reports make Thomas Hooker to have been a strong
and resourceful man, a better democrat than his fellow ministers, the
father of New England Congregationalism as it later came to be when the
Presbyterianizing tendency was checked--a practical leader who rejected
equally the reactionary theocracy of John Cotton, and the leveling
radicalism of Roger Williams.
For the pronounced democratic sympathies of this “light of the western
churches”--a sympathy quite unusual in his day and world--some grounds
will be discovered in his commonplace origin. Unlike John Cotton, who
had a “descent from honourable progenitors,” Hooker was sprung from
a plain yeoman family that had made no stir in the world. His native
hamlet, Marfield in Leicestershire, numbered no more than six houses,
tucked away in a secluded countryside. His schooling was got by the
aid of scholarships: at Market-Bosworth and later at Cambridge, where
he entered as sizar, which meant among other things that he was waiter
on tables in the Hall. When he was settled in a forty-pound living
at Esher, in Surrey, he married a “waiting-woman” to the wife of his
patron; and when he died, after a laborious life spent in the cause
of righteousness, he left an estate appraised at 846 pounds, 15
shillings, exclusive of his books, more than half of which modest sum
was represented by the Hartford homestead.[37] Which scanty information
is sufficient to tell us that Thomas Hooker was a simple man in worldly
ambitions as well as in origin, not given to climbing or feathering his
own nest, with none of the great associates or aristocratic ties of
Winthrop and Ward and Cotton, a churchman more inclined to the ways of
Independency than to Presbyterianism.
In his professional work he was rather the pastor than the teacher,
caring more for experimental religion than for theological disputation.
He was an embodiment of the moral fervor of the Reformation that
protested against the scandal of “dumb priests.” He seems to have been
the most stimulating preacher of early New England, and it was as a
lecturer that he had made a name for himself before he was driven from
his English charge by Laud. The lecturer was a characteristic Puritan
innovation, much hated by the Anglicans. Translated into a modern
equivalent, it meant an agitator who used the pulpit to spread the
new gospel of free judgment in religious matters, and other gospels
displeasing to absolutism. That such men were not liked by Charles
and his Archbishop goes without saying; they were “the people’s
creatures”--a certain Tory churchman complained to the King--and “blew
the bellows of their sedition.” Such being the case it seemed but
common prudence to muzzle them, and as early as 1622 James laid down
an orthodox program, forbidding any of lesser rank than “a bishop or
dean [to] presume to preach in any popular auditory on the deep points
of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality,
efficacy, irresistibility of God’s grace,” and restricting Sunday
afternoon sermons to such innocuous themes as the “Catechism, Creed,
or Ten Commandments.”[38] It was an endeavor to stop men’s thinking by
putting the crown of martyrdom on the lovers of truth. To forbid the
Puritan to talk of such things, to shut up the Word of God from him,
was to blow the bellows of his sedition indeed.
That Thomas Hooker was not a man to be muzzled must have been clear
to all who knew his stubborn English will. In his homely vigor he was
not unlike Hugh Latimer, direct and vigorous in speech and action,
not easily turned aside from the path of duty, possessing much of
the old bishop’s courage in dealing with great men and their follies.
He knew a fool and a tyrant in high places, and was bold to call them
by their true names. “He was a person,” said Cotton Mather, “who
while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket.” He
was the more dangerous because he had put his own temper under strict
governance--“For though he were a man of cholerick disposition, and had
a mighty vigour and fervour of spirit ... yet he had ordinarily as much
government of his choler as a man has of a mastiff dog in a chain; he
‘could let out his dog, and pull in his dog, as he pleased.’”
So ardent a temperament, joined to remarkable powers of oratory, gave
to Thomas Hooker very unusual popular influence, some measure of which
is revealed in a letter of a certain sycophant of the court party, who
wrote to Laud’s tool, Chancellor Duck, under date of May 20, 1629, as
follows:
All men’s eares are now filled with ye obstreperous clamours of his
followers against my Lord ... as a man endeavouring to suppress
good preaching and advance Popery. All would be here very calme
and quiet if he [Hooker] might depart.... If he be suspended its
the resolution of his friends and himselfe to settle his abode in
Essex, and maintenance is promised him in plentifull manner for
the fruition of his private conference, which hath already more
impeached the peace of our church than his publique ministry. His
genius will still haunte all the pulpits in ye country, where any
of his scholers may be admitted to preach.... There be divers
young ministers about us ... that spend their time in conference
with him; and return home and preach what he hath brewed.... Our
people’s pallats grow so out of tast yt noe food contents them
but of Mr. Hooker’s dressing. I have lived in Essex to see many
changes, and have seene the people idolizing many new ministers
and lecturers, but this man surpasses them all for learning and
some other considerable partes and ... gains more and far greater
followers than all before him.... If my Lord tender his owne future
peace ... let him connive at Mr. Hooker’s departure.[39]
Clearly the England of Laud with its pursuivants and tattling tongues
of “dumb ministers”--who might well be jealous of his eloquence--was no
fit place for the activities of Thomas Hooker. Even though he should
be suspended, he would still be reckoned dangerous to prerogative with
his private conferences and his following of young ministers. So he
was driven overseas into Holland, whence after a few years’ experience
with the Archbishop’s spies, and dislike of the Presbyterian system
there practiced, he set forth for America where he arrived on the same
boat with John Cotton and Samuel Stone, and was inducted as pastor of
the church at Newtown which had been awaiting his coming over. Shortly
thereafter began the open dissatisfaction of the Cambridge congregation
with the policy of the oligarchy, which resulted three years later in
the removal of Hooker and his church to Hartford. The causes of this
removal--an event that profoundly agitated the colony--have been much
discussed, but they have never been cleared of what may have been
an intentional vagueness. Possibly, as Hubbard suggests, there were
jealousies between Hooker and Cotton, Winthrop, and Haynes, which it
would have been unseemly to expose in open court;[40] but the likelier
explanation would seem to lie in the incompatibility of political
views, which at bottom was a division on the question of aristocracy or
democracy in church and state. The Cambridge men seem to have disliked
the oligarchic rule of the magistrates; they doubtless sympathized with
the popular party and may have encouraged the counter aggressions of
the deputies, whose assertiveness fills so much space in Winthrop’s
journal and betokens his concern. It is likely that there was more
dissatisfaction than got into journals, either private or official;
and it is equally likely that Thomas Hooker was a prime force in
quickening the democratic unrest. “After Mr. Hooker’s coming over,”
said Hubbard in an often quoted passage, “it was observed that many of
the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.” Nevertheless,
Hooker was not a contentious person, to spread a clamor through the
commonwealth and endanger the success of the plantation. He believed
that “Time, Place, Outward Decency and Comelinesse” were desirable in
the management of public affairs; and so instead of descending to sharp
dispute with men whom he respected and loved even though he disagreed
with them in political views, he chose to remove quietly out of their
jurisdiction, making as little cause for embroilment as possible.
After all, the most illuminating commentary upon the causes of
the removal is the spirit of the institutions set up in the new
settlement. While we need not go so far as to assert, with the
historians of Connecticut, that “the birthplace of American democracy
is Hartford,” we must recognize in the Fundamental Orders adopted by
the General Assembly, January 14, 1639, a plan of popular government
so broadly democratic as to entitle it to be called “the first written
constitution of modern democracy.”[41] Concerning the important part
played by Hooker in this work there can be no doubt. His influence
was commanding, and the sneer of old Samuel Peters--“Hooker reigned
twelve years high-priest over Hertford”--scarcely overstates the
fact. And this great influence was thrown persistently in favor of
democratic procedure in church and state. He definitely rejected the
Boston practice of magisterial autocracy. In opposition to Winthrop,
who asserted, “Whatsoever sentence the magistrate gives, the judgment
is the Lord’s, though he do it not by any rule prescribed by civil
authority,” Hooker argued:
That in the matter which is referred to the judge, the sentence
should lie in his breast, or be left to his discretion, according
to which he should go, I am afraid it is a course which wants both
safety and warrant. I must confess, I ever looked at it as a way
which leads directly to tyranny, and so to confusion, and must
plainly profess, if it was in my liberty, I should choose neither
to live nor leave my posterity under such a government.[42]
At another time, replying to Winthrop’s justification of oligarchic
rule on the ground that “the best part is always the least, and of that
best part the wiser is always the lesser,” Hooker frankly rested his
case for democracy on the good sense of the people as a whole:
It is also a truth that counsel should be sought from counsellors;
but the question yet is, who should those be. Reserving smaller
matters which fall in occasionally in common course, to a lower
counsel, in matters of greater importance which concerns the common
good, a general counsel chosen by all, I conceive, under favour,
most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole.[43]
Before the General Court, on May 31, 1638, eight months before the
Fundamental Orders were adopted, Hooker preached a remarkable sermon
on popular sovereignty. Taking for his text Deut. 1:13--the passage
on which John Eliot later erected his fantastic Utopia--he elaborated
the thesis that “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in
the free consent of the people,” and therefore that “the choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance,”
and “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it
is in their power also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power
and place unto which they call them.”[44] This was Hooker’s reply to
the oligarchic policy of the Bay in limiting the number of freemen
in order to maintain the supremacy of the magistrates; and it throws
light on the comment written out of England in the spring of 1636,
to John Wilson, that “there is great division of judgment in matters
of religion amongst good ministers & people which moved Mr. Hoker
to remove”; and that “you are so strict in admission of members to
your church, that more than halfe are out of your church in all your
congregations, & that Mr. Hoker befor he went away preached against
yt (as one reports who hard him).”[45] In the new commonwealth there
was neither a property qualification nor a religious test limiting the
right of franchise; the admission of freemen was reckoned a political
matter and left to the several township democracies. The reaction
against the oligarchic policy of Massachusetts Bay carried far.
If we had Hooker’s sermon in full we should know much more about
his political theory; yet even from the meager and tantalizing
notes that have been preserved, we can deduce fairly certainly the
major principles of his philosophy. Three creative ideas seem to
have determined his thinking: the compact theory of the state, the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the conception of the state as a
public-service corporation, strictly responsible to the will of the
majority--ideas that Roger Williams elaborated in detail and during
many years of service reduced to a working system in the commonwealth
of Rhode Island. That Hooker should have grasped so firmly the
essentials of the new democratic theory will surprise no one who is
acquainted with the political speculations of English Independency.
They were all implicit in the new theory of church and state that such
thinkers as Williams and Vane and Milton were clarifying, and since the
days of Robert Browne they had been familiar in one form or another
to the young Puritan radicals at the universities. The compact idea,
which held in solution the doctrine of natural rights, had established
itself firmly in New England with the coming of the Pilgrims. The
Mayflower compact and the church covenant provided the basis for the
social organization of Plymouth; and the covenant idea had taken so
strong a hold on the popular mind of Massachusetts Bay that the astute
leaders of the oligarchy were quick to see the advantage of investing
the charter, in the popular imagination, with the sanctity of the
compact idea; and by a subtle process of idealizing, they transmuted
the charter of a trading company into a fundamental organic law, that
was reckoned an adequate written constitution to safeguard the rights
of the people. It was a clever political move, but it seems not to have
satisfied Thomas Hooker, who was too liberal in his views to accept the
shadow for the substance. As a left-wing Independent he would have a
real compact, and a popular fundamental law to safeguard the liberties
of the people; and he saw to it that the new commonwealth was broadly
based on the common will, rather than narrowly on the rule of the
gentry. The democratic order of Connecticut was English Independency
transplanted to the new world.
To Hooker New England Congregationalism owes as great a debt as
does New England democracy. The last great work he undertook was a
defense of the New England way against the criticism of the English
Presbyterians. He was to prove a powerful advocate, for not only was
he intellectually equipped to write a knotty book in answer to other
knotty books, but unlike Cotton and Davenport and Mather, he was
wholly in sympathy with Congregationalism, and had no mind to conceal
or equivocate concerning its democratic tendencies. He would write
no apology, but a frank and vigorous defense. His church polity, as
elaborated in his _Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_, is
professedly Hebraic. “Ecclesiastical Policy,” he asserts baldly, “is
a skill of ordering the affairs of Christ’s house, according to the
pattern of his word,” and he then proceeds to postulate the principle
of absolutism by accepting a divine sovereign will. But this divine
sovereignty was a blow struck at all temporal absolutisms, for it spoke
through no vicegerent of pope, bishop, presbytery or magistrate, but
only through the voice of the individual subject. It is the priesthood
of all believers. “The _Supreme_ and _Monarchicall_ power resides onely
in our Saviour, can onely be given and attributed to him, and to none
other.” There remained, then, the difficult business of determining
how the sovereign will of Christ is to be wrought on earth, and into
this Hooker delved with such convincing thoroughness that, in his own
words, “no man that hath supped on Logick, hath a forehead to gainsay”
his conclusions. He was bold in innovation--“a cause is not the lesse
true, because of late discovered”; but after quieting “the stomachs of
such, whose expectations are not answered in any opinion, unless it
be moldy with age,” he proceeds to explain the true nature of church
organization thus:
But whether all Ecclesiasticall power be impaled, impropriated,
and rightly taken in to the Presbytery alone: Or that the people
of the Particular Churches should come in for a share, according
to their places and proportions; This is left as the subject of
the inquiry of this age, and that which occasions great thought of
heart of all hands: Great thoughts of hearts in the Presbytery, as
being very loth to part with that so chief privilege, and of which
they have taken possession so many years. Great Thoughts of heart
amongst the Churches, how they may clear their right, and claim
it in such pious sobriety and moderation, as becomes the Saints:
being unwilling to loose their cause and comfort, meerly upon a
_nihil dicit_: or forever to be deprived of so precious a legacy,
as they conceive this is, though it hath been withheld from them,
by the tyranny of the Pope, and prescription of times. Nor can they
conceive it lesse, then a heedlesse betraying of their speciall
liberties, and not selling but casting away their inheritance, and
right, by a careless silence, when the course of providence, as
the juncture of times now present themselves, allows them a writt
_Ad melius inquirendum_.... These are the times when people shall
be fitted for such priviledges, fit I say to obtain them, and fit
to use them.... And whereas it hath been charged upon the people,
that through their ignorance and unskilfulnesse, they are not able
to wield such priviledges, and therefore not fit to share in any
such power, The Lord hath promised: To take away the vail from all
faces in the mountain, the _weak_ shall be as David, and David as
an Angel of God.[46]
The church of Visible Saints confederating together to walk in the
fellowship of the faith ... is _Totum essentiale_.... Election
of the People rightly ordered by the rule of Christ, gives the
essentials to an Officer, or leaves the impression of a true
outward Call, and so an Office-power upon a Pastor ... _there is a
communicating of Power_ by Voluntary Subjection when, though there
be _no Office-power, formaliter_ in the people, yet they willingly
yeelding themselves to be ruled by another, desiring and calling of
him to take that rule; he accepting of what they yeeld, possessing
that right which they put upon him, by free consent; _hence
ariseth_ this Relation and authority of Office-rule.[47]
It is crabbed prose, not altogether worthy of a man who kept the
thorns crackling under the pot when he stood face to face with his
congregation, and though we may feel inclined to accept the challenge
of a certain old Puritan, and “lay a _caveat_ against the author’s
sweet and solid handling” of his matter, we shall be little inclined
to lay a _caveat_ against his doctrine. Here is no casuistry like John
Cotton’s, denying Congregationalism while ostensibly defending it; but
a frank acceptance of the supreme power of the people. “The Lord hath
promised to take away the veil from all faces”--in this faith Thomas
Hooker walked all his days, and what he could himself do to remove
the veil from the faces of the common people, he did heartily as unto
the Lord, thereby proving his right to be remembered among the early
stewards of our American democracy.
III • Roger Williams • Seeker
The gods, it would seem, were pleased to have their jest with Roger
Williams by sending him to earth before his time. In manner and speech
a seventeenth-century Puritan controversialist, in intellectual
interests he was contemporary with successive generations of prophets
from his own days to ours. His hospitable mind anticipated a surprising
number of the idealisms of the future. As a transcendental mystic he
was a forerunner of Emerson and the Concord school, discovering an
indwelling God of love in a world of material things; as a speculative
Seeker he was a forerunner of Channing and the Unitarians, discovering
the hope of a more liberal society in the practice of the open mind;
as a political philosopher he was a forerunner of Paine and the French
romantic school, discovering the end of government in concern for the
_res publica_, and the cohesive social tie in the principle of good
will. Democrat and Christian, the generation to which he belongs is not
yet born, and all his life he remained a stranger amongst men. Things
natural and right to John Cotton were no better than anachronisms to
him. He lived and dreamed in a future he was not to see, impatient
to bring to men a heaven they were unready for. And because they
were unready they could not understand the grounds of his hope, and
not understanding they were puzzled and angry and cast him out to
dream his dreams in the wilderness. There was abundant reason for his
banishment. A child of light, he came bringing not peace but the sword.
A humane and liberal spirit, he was groping for a social order more
generous than any theocracy--that should satisfy the aspirations of
men for a catholic fellowship, greater than sect or church, village or
nation, embracing all races and creeds, bringing together the sundered
societies of men in a common spirit of good will.
Roger Williams was the most provocative figure thrown upon the
Massachusetts shores by the upheaval in England, the one original
thinker amongst a number of capable social architects. An intellectual
barometer, fluctuating with every change in the rising storm of
revolution, he came transporting hither the new and disturbant
doctrines of the Leveler, loosing wild foxes with fire-brands to ravage
the snug fields of the Presbyterian Utopia. He was the “_first rebel_
against the divine _church-order_ established in the wilderness,” as
Cotton Mather rightly reported. But he was very much more than that;
he was a rebel against all the stupidities that interposed a barrier
betwixt men and the fellowship of their dreams. Those who found such
stupidities serviceable to their ends, naturally disliked Roger
Williams and believed they were serving God by undoing his work. There
is a naïve passage in the _Magnalia_ that suggests how incomprehensible
to the theocratic mind was this stormy petrel that came out of England
to flutter and clamor about Boston and Salem, until he was driven forth
to find such resting place as he might, there to bring forth after his
kind.
In the year 1654, a certain windmill in the Low Countries, whirling
round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a violent storm
then blowing, the stone at length by its rapid motion became so
intensely hot as to fire the mill, from whence the flames, being
dispersed by the high winds, did set a whole Town on fire. But I
can tell my reader that, above twenty years before this, there was
a whole country in America like to be set on fire by the rapid
motion of a Windmill in the head of one particular man.[48]
And John Cotton, worsted in his bout with his brilliant antagonist,
and perhaps frightened at the latter’s free speculation, found
such satisfaction as he could in epithets. Roger Williams was an
“evill-worker”; his “head runneth round”; “it would weary a sober
minde to pursue such windy fancies,” such “offensive and disturbant
doctrines”; when “a man is delivered up to Satan ... no marvell if he
cast forth fire-brands, and arrows, and mortall-things”; “it is such a
transcendent light, as putteth out all the lights in the world besides.”
The open facts of Roger Williams’ life are known to everybody. Born
in the year 1603,[49] he became a protégé of the great Coke, was
educated at Cambridge, and destined for the law, but forsook it for the
ministry. He was well advanced in his studies and coming to conclusions
that must have disturbed his conservative friends, at the time of the
Great Migration. Beginning as an Anglican, then turning Separatist,
then Baptist, and finally Seeker,[50] he is perhaps more adequately
described as a Puritan intellectual who became a Christian freethinker,
more concerned with social commonwealths than with theological dogmas.
He passed rapidly through successive phases of current thought
to end as a Leveler. Before quitting England he had embraced the
principle of Separatism, and on his first coming over he refused the
teachership of the Boston church--the position given to Cotton two
years later--because it had not broken wholly with Anglicanism. He went
to the more liberal Salem, where his inconvenient questioning of land
titles and his views on the charter brought him into conflict with the
Boston authorities. Refusing to be silenced he was banished and made
his way to Rhode Island--“sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a
bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean”--there to
found a commonwealth on democratic principles.
Yet how inadequately do such meager facts reveal the deeper sources
of his militancy! He lived in the realm of ideas, of inquiry and
discussion; and his actions were creatively determined by principles
the bases of which he examined with critical insight. Instead of being
a weather vane, blown about by every wind of doctrine, he was an
adventurous pioneer, surveying the new fields of thought laid open
by the Reformation, and marking out the several spheres of church and
state in the ordering of a true commonwealth. He was the incarnation of
Protestant individualism, seeking new social ties to take the place of
those that were loosening; and as a child of a great age of political
speculation his religion issued in political theory rather than in
theological dogma. Like other Separatist-Levelers he had penetrated
to the foundations of the New Testament and had taken to heart the
revolutionary ideals that underlie its teachings. It was the spirit of
love that served as teacher to him; love that exalted the meanest to
equality with the highest in the divine republic of Jesus, and gave
an exalted sanction to the conception of a Christian commonwealth. He
regarded his fellow men literally as the children of God and brothers
in Christ; and from this primary conception of the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man, he deduced his political philosophy. Like
Channing two hundred years later, he sought to adjust his social
program to the determining fact that human worth knows neither Jew nor
Gentile, rank nor caste; and following the example of his Master he
went forth into a hostile world, seeking to make it over.
With this spirit of Christian fellowship, warm and human and lovable,
repudiating all coercion, there was joined an eager mysticism--a
yearning for intimate personal union with Christ as symbolized in the
parable of the vine and the branches, a union as close as that of the
bride and her husband. Running through his writings is a recurrent echo
of the Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with a glowing
mysticism: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among
the lilies.... I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.” But when he
went out into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world as a land where the lover might dwell
with his bride. Yet upon his arrival there he found the churches still
“implicitly National,” and “yet asleep in respect of abundant ignorance
and negligence, and consequently grosse abominations and pollutions of
Worship, in which the choicest servants of God, and most faithfull
Witnesses of many truths have lived in more or lesse, yea in maine and
fundamental points, ever since the Apostasie.” Which “abominations and
pollutions of Worship,” he now proposed to sweep away altogether.[51]
It was not an easy program, nor one entered upon lightly. Better
than most, Roger Williams understood how closely interwoven were the
threads of church and state. Separatism, with its necessary corollary
of toleration, could not be unraveled from Carolinian society without
loosening the whole social fabric. It was a political question even
more than ecclesiastical; and it could justify itself only in the
light of a total political philosophy. No other man in New England
comprehended so fully the difficulties involved in the problem, as
Roger Williams, or examined them so thoroughly; and out of his long
speculations emerged a theory of the commonwealth that must be reckoned
the richest contribution of Puritanism to American political thought.
The just renown of Roger Williams has too long been obscured by
ecclesiastical historians, who in emphasizing his defense of the
principle of toleration have overlooked the fact that religious
toleration was only a necessary deduction from the major principles
of his political theory, and that he was concerned with matters far
more fundamental than the negative virtue of non-interference in the
domain of individual faith. He was primarily a political philosopher
rather than a theologian--one of the acutest and most searching of
his generation of Englishmen, the teacher of Vane and Cromwell and
Milton, a forerunner of Locke and the natural-rights school, one of the
notable democratic thinkers that the English race has produced. Much
of his life was devoted to the problem of discovering a new basis for
social reorganization, and his intellectual progress was marked by an
abundant wreckage of obsolete theory and hoary fiction that strewed
his path. He was a social innovator on principle, and he left no system
unchallenged; each must justify itself in reason and expediency or be
put aside. Broadly the development of his thought falls into three
stages: the substitution of the compact theory of the state for the
divine-right theory; the rejection of the suppositious compact of the
earlier school and the fictitious abstract state--still postulated by
many thinkers--and the substitution of a realistic conception of the
political state as the sovereign repository of the social will, and
the government--or agent of the state--as the practical instrument of
society to effect its desired ends; and finally, the difficult problem
of creating the necessary machinery of a democratic commonwealth, as
the exigencies of the Rhode Island experiment required. Throughout, the
inspiration of his thinking was social rather than narrowly political
or theological, and the creative source would seem to have been the
middle ages with their fruitful principle of men in a given society
enrolling themselves voluntarily as members of bodies corporate,
finding in such corporate ties a sufficient and all-embracing social
bond.[52]
In his substitution of the compact theory for divine right, Williams
was brought face to face with the fundamental assumption of the
Massachusetts theocracy, based on numerous passages of Scripture,
that the political state is established and sanctioned by the God
of the Hebrews--an assumption that was freely used to justify the
engrossing of authority by the magistracy. As a theologian he
critically examined the Scriptural authorities, and while conceding
the divine source of government in general, he was careful to cut
away all autocratic deductions from the Pauline assertion that “the
powers that be are ordained of God.” “Government and order in families,
towns, etc., is an ordinance of the Most High, Rom. 13, for the peace
and good of mankind”[53] he admitted; but he agreed with Richard
Hooker in discovering this order of government to be no other than
natural law. The state is divine in origin because it is natural,
and what is natural is of God. The Hebraic commonwealth had been
established immediately in an ordinance of Jehovah, but Christ and
his disciples regarded the state and God as distinct authorities,
not to be confused--“Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The conclusion
at which he arrived, then, from the merging of divine ordinances and
natural law, was expressed in a doctrine that sets apart the individual
citizen in all his spiritual and intellectual rights, from the subject
of the commonwealth, and provides the basis for his principle of
toleration. “A Civill Government is an ordinance of God, to conserve
the Civill peace of the people, so farre as concerns their Bodies and
Goods,” and no farther.[54] From this position he never retreated.
Every lawful Magistrate whether succeeding or elective, is not only
the Minister of God, but the Minister or servant of the people
also (what people or nation soever they be all the world over),
and that Minister or Magistrate goes beyond his commission who
intermeddles with that which cannot be given him in commission from
the people....[55]
Having thus reduced the divine-right field within narrow limits and
translated it into an abstraction, he preëmpts all the ground of
practical politics for his compact theory. In accord with a long line
of liberal thinkers running back through Richard Hooker to Augustine
and the earlier Roman school, he accepted the major deductions from the
compact theory of the state: that government is a man-made institution,
that it rests on consent, and that it is founded on the assumed
equality of the subjects. He had only to translate these abstractions
into concrete terms, and apply them realistically, to create a new and
vital theory. The covenant idea of church organization had long been
familiar to Separatists. To this the Pilgrims had added the Mayflower
compact and Thomas Hooker had drawn up the Connecticut compact.
Government resting on consent and authorized by written agreement was
then no untried novelty when Roger Williams began his long speculations
on the nature and functions of the political state. With Hobbes he
traced the origin of the state to social necessity. The condition of
nature is a condition of anarchy--a war of all against all; and for
mutual protection the state takes its rise. “The World otherwise would
be like a sea, wherein Men, like Fishes, would hunt and devoure each
other, and the greater devour the lesse.”[56] But unlike the fiction
assumed by Hobbes and Locke, this was no suppositious contract between
ruler and ruled in prehistoric times, but present and actual, entered
into between the several members of a free community for their common
governance; nor on the other hand, like Burke’s irrevocable compact,
was it an unyielding constitution or fundamental law; but flexible,
responsive to changing conditions, continually modified to meet present
needs. It is no other than a mutual agreement, arrived at frankly by
discussion and compromise, to live together in a political union,
organizing the life of the commonwealth in accordance with nature,
reason, justice, and expediency.
From this conception of the flexible nature of compact law came the
sharp delimitation between state and government that he was at pains
to make clear, and that constitutes a significant phase of his theory.
Having rejected in his thinking the fictitious abstract state, the
repository of an equally fictitious abstract sovereignty, he located
sovereignty in the total body of citizens embraced within the community
consciousness, acting in a political capacity. The state is society
organized, government is the state functioning--it is the political
machinery devised by the sovereign people to effect definite ends. And
since the single end and purpose for which the body of citizens erect
the state is the furtherance of the communal well-being, the government
becomes a convenient instrument to serve the common weal, responsible
to the sovereign people and strictly limited by the terms of the social
agreement. “The Sovereign power of all civill Authority,” he asserted,
“is founded in the consent of the People that every Commonwealth hath
radically and fundamentally. The very Common-weales, Bodies of People
... have fundamentally in themselves the Root of Power, to set up what
Government and Governors they shall agree upon.”[57] Since governments
are but “Derivatives and Agents immediately derived and employed as
eyes and hands and instruments,” the state or sovereign people can
make their “own severall Lawes and Agreements ... according to their
severall Natures, Dispositions and Constitutions, and their Common
peace and wellfare.”[58] Final appeal is to “the Bar of the People or
Commonweal, where all may personally meet, as in some Commonweales of
small number, or in greater by their Representatives”--a system that
suits with the “Nature, Conditions and circumstances of the People,”
according to the “Circumstances of time and place.”[59] In a well-known
passage he puts the matter more compactly, thus:
From this _Grant_ I infer ... that the _Soveraigne, originall_, and
_foundation of civill power_ lies in the _People_.... And if so,
that a People may erect and establish what _forme_ of _Government_
seemes to them most meete for their _civill condition_: It is
evident that such _Governments_ as are by them erected and
established, have no more _power_, nor for no longer time, then the
_civill power_ or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them
with. This is cleere not only in _Reason_, but in the experience
of all _commonweales_, where the people are not deprived of their
naturall freedom by the power of Tyrants.[60]
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience and
reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure of
freedom and well-being. It is armed with a potential power of coercion,
but only to secure justice. In such a state government can subsist only
by making proselytes to sound reason, by compromise and arbitration,
and not by force. But if sovereignty inheres in the majority will, what
securities remain for individual and minority rights? What fields lie
apart from the inquisition of the majority, and by what agencies shall
the engrossing of power be thwarted? The replies to such questions, so
fundamental to every democratic program, he discovers in a variety of
principles; to the former in an adaptation of the spirit of medieval
society that restricted political functions by social usage, and to the
latter by the application of local home rule, the initiative and the
referendum, and the recall. In the large field he ascribes to social
custom, he was a follower of Luther and a forerunner of French romantic
thinkers. His creative conception was an adaptation of the medieval
theory of the corporation, or group of persons voluntarily joining for
specific purposes under the law; and this idea he applies to the vexed
question of the relation of church and state. The legal status of the
church, he argued, is identical with that of a trading company; it is a
corporate body with corporate rights, and the several members enjoy all
the freedoms and privileges that inhere in them by law and nature in
their civil capacity. The character of its membership and the content
of its creed are of no different concern to the civil magistrates than
those of any other corporation. “The state religion of the world,”
he asserted, “is a Politic invention of men to maintain the civil
state.”[61] Elaborated at greater length, his thesis is this:
The _Church_ or company of _worshippers_ (whether true or false)
is like unto a ... _Corporation, Society_, or _Company_ ... in
_London_; which Companies may hold their _Courts_, keep their
_Records_, hold _disputations_; and in matters concerning their
_Societie_, may dissent, divide, breake into _Schismes_ and
_Factions_, sue and implead each other at the _Law_, yea wholly
breake up and dissolve into pieces and nothing, and yet the
_peace_ of the _Citie_ not be in the least measure impaired or
disturbed; because the _essence_ or being of the _Citie_, and so
the _well-being_ and _peace_ thereof is essentially distinct from
those particular _Societies_: the _Citie-Courts, Citie-Lawes,
Citie-punishments_ distinct from theirs. The _Citie_ was before
them, and stands absolute and intire, when such a _Corporation_ or
_Societie_ is taken down.[62]
Having thus effectively secularized the church on its institutional
side, he laid down twelve theses, of which these reach to the heart of
the matter:
(1) _God_ requireth not an _uniformity_ of _Religion_ to be
_inacted_ and _inforced_ in any _civill state_; which inforced
_uniformity_ (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of
_civill Warre, ravishing_ of _conscience, persecution_ of _Christ
Jesus_ in his servants, and of the _hypocrisie_ and destruction
of millions of souls. (2) It is the will and command of _God_,
that ... a _permission_ of the most _Paganish, Jewish, Turkish_,
or _Antichristian consciences_ and _worships_, bee granted to
_all_ men in all _Nations_ and _Countries_: and they are onely
to bee _fought_ against with that _Sword_ which is onely (in
_Soule matters_) _able_ to _conquer_, to wit, the _Sword_ of
_Gods Spirit_, the _Word_ of _God_. (3) True _civility_ and
_Christianity_ may both flourish in a _state_ or _Kingdome_,
notwithstanding the _permission_ of divers and contrary
_consciences_, either of _Jew_ or _Gentile_.[63]
Abhorrent as such doctrine was to the Massachusetts theocrats, Roger
Williams did not cease to press it home to their minds and consciences.
“I know and am persuaded,” he wrote Winthrop on July 21, 1637, “that
your misguidings are great and lamentable, and the further you pass
in your way, the further you wander, and the end of one vexation will
be but the beginning of another, till conscience be permitted (though
erroneous) to be free amongst you.”[64] It was not toleration in the
narrow sense of benevolent non-interference by an authority that
refrained from exercising its reserved right, that Roger Williams was
interested in; it was rather religious liberty as a fundamental right,
that had never been surrendered to the civil power, that lay beyond its
jurisdiction and was in no way answerable to it, that he upheld in his
great work _The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience_;
and the long dispute with John Cotton was, in its deeper significance,
a dispute between two schools of political theory and two experiments
in commonwealth building. In that notable debate aristocracy and
democracy joined issues, and the vital question of the rights and
liberties of the individual citizen in the political state for the
first time was critically examined in America.
From the foregoing analysis of his political theory it should be
clear that Roger Williams was a confirmed individualist who carried
to its logical conclusion the Reformation principle of the right of
private inquiry. Only Vane and Milton of his generation of Englishmen
went so far along that path. He had seen the liberalisms involved
in Luther’s premises submerged by the rising nationalism which
ambitious princes found useful for selfish ends; and he had seen the
policy of the Massachusetts magistrates driving boldly in the same
direction. That Rhode Island should not repeat the old unhappy mistake
of coercive absolutism, was a matter therefore of vital concern to
him. A great experiment in democracy was to be tried, and to that
experiment he devoted his life. Into the form and structure of the new
commonwealth went the best thought of English Independency. It was
founded on the principles of “liberty and equality, both in land and
government,”[65] and established in the sovereignty of the people.
That government should not engross its powers, the compact entered
into provided for frequent elections, a single-chambered legislature,
joint and individual initiative of laws, compulsory referendum, the
right of recall of all laws including the constitution, and appeal
to arbitration. A rigid constitution, augmenting in authority with
age and veneration, Roger Williams feared as acutely as did Paine
or Jefferson. To vest sovereignty in the courts through the right
of review and interpretation was repugnant to his whole political
theory. The fundamental law could be interpreted only by the power
that created it originally, namely, the sovereign people acting in
a political capacity. Within the larger framework of the state the
several towns retained the right of home rule in local matters. They
were corporations, erected like the church in the spirit of medieval
corporate law, competent to rule themselves, yet not infringing
on the sovereignty that granted them their powers. In short, to
adapt the words of a modern student, the state of Rhode Island as
erected by Roger Williams in accordance with the principles of his
political philosophy, was “nothing so much as a great public-service
corporation.”[66] Or, as another student has put it, “If democracy ...
in its ultimate meaning be held to imply not only a government in which
the preponderant share of power resides in the hands of the people, but
a society based on the principles of political and religious freedom,
Rhode Island beyond any other of the American Colonies is entitled to
be called democratic.”[67]
It was a hazardous experiment to undertake in an age when the ark
of the democratic covenant found few places of refuge. Its friends
were only a handful and its enemies many and powerful, and had it not
been for a group of defenders in Parliament, the Rhode Island venture
would have been brought to a speedy end. English Independency saved
for America what English Presbyterianism would have destroyed. To Sir
Harry Vane Rhode Island owes a debt of gratitude second only to that
due Roger Williams. But though its godly neighbors were not permitted
to destroy Rhode Island, they were free to slander and spread evil
reports, and so thoroughly did they do their work that for upwards of
two hundred years the little commonwealth was commonly spoken of in
such terms as Rogues Island and the State of Confusion; not indeed,
till it left off following agrarian and Populistic gods, till it had
ceased to be democratic, did it become wholly respectable. It was not
so much the reputed turbulence of Rhode Island that was disapproved by
the Boston magistrates; but rather the disturbing example of a colony
at their very doors, which, in denying the right of the godly to police
society, gave encouragement to evil-disposed persons in their own sober
commonwealth. Every democracy, they believed, was so notoriously mad
and lawless--as both sacred and profane authorities had sufficiently
demonstrated--that the Boston oligarchy never forgave Parliament
for refusing them permission to establish a mandatory over their
self-willed neighbors.
It was to prevent such meddling that Roger Williams had been at pains
to secure a Parliamentary charter; and he saw to it that the charter
terms should not restrict the democratic liberties. His faith in the
sobriety and good sense of the people of Rhode Island was never shaken.
In spite of many difficulties that grew out of the sharp individualism
of vigorous characters, the colony proved to be a good place to dwell
for those who were content to share the common rights and privileges.
In a letter to Vane, written in 1654, the founder apologizes for some
of the things reported of them, but the apology does not detract from
the just pride with which he contemplated the solid achievements of the
Rhode Island experiment:
Possibly a sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton. We have long
drunk of the cup of as great liberties as any people we can hear of
under the whole heaven. We have not only been long free (together
with all New England) from the iron yolk of wolfish bishops, and
their popish ceremonies ... but we have sitten quiet and dry from
the streams of blood spilt by that war in our native Country. We
have not felt the new chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor in this
colony have we been consumed with the over-zealous fire of the
(so called) godly christian magistrates. Sir, we have not known
what an excise means; we have almost forgotten what tithes are,
yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth. We could name
other special privileges, ingredients of our sweet cup, which your
great wisdom knows to be very powerful (except more than ordinary
watchfulness) to render the best of men wanton and forgetful.[68]
England gave her best when she sent us Roger Williams. A great thinker
and a bold innovator, the repository of the generous liberalisms of
a vigorous age, he brought with him the fine wheat of long years of
English tillage to sow in the American wilderness. How much America
owes to him is perhaps, after all the intervening years, not adequately
realized; the shadow of Massachusetts Bay still too much obscures
the large proportions of one who was certainly the most generous,
most open-minded, most lovable, of the Puritan emigrants--the truest
Christian amongst many who sincerely desired to be Christian. He
believed in men and in their native justice, and he spent his life
freely in the cause of humanity. Neither race nor creed sundered
him from his fellows; the Indian was his brother equally with the
Englishman. He was a Leveler because he was convinced that society
with its caste institutions dealt unjustly with the common man; he was
a democrat because he believed that the end and object of the political
state was the common well-being; he was an iconoclast because he was
convinced that the time had come when a new social order must be
erected on the decay of the old. “_Liberavi animam meam_,” he said with
just pride; “I have not hid within my _breast_ my _souls_ belief.” “It
was more than forty years after his exile that he lived here,” wrote
Cotton Mather, “and in many thinges acquitted himself so laudably, that
many juditious persons judged him to have the root of the matter in
him, during the long winter of this retirement.” Since those words were
written increasing numbers of “juditious persons” have come to agree
with the reluctant judgment of Cotton Mather, and are verily persuaded
that Master Roger Williams “had the root of the matter in him.” In his
own day he was accounted an enemy of society, and the commonwealth
of Massachusetts has never rescinded the decree of banishment issued
against him; yet like so many unshackled thinkers, he was a seeker
after a better order, friend to a nobler and more humane society.
If he transported to America the democratic aspirations of English
Independency, it is perhaps well to recall the price that was exacted
of him for his service:
Let the reader fancy him in 1640, a man of thirty-four, of bold and
stout jaws, but with the richest and softest eyes, gazing out over
the Bay of his dwelling, a spiritual Crusoe, the excommunicated
even of Hugh Peters, and the most extreme and outcast soul in all
America.[69]
Footnotes
[37] See Walker, _Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder, Democrat_.
[38] _Ibid._, pp. 40-44.
[39] _Ibid._, pp. 45-46.
[40] The testimony of Roger Williams seems to imply as much: “Mr.
Haynes, Governor of Connecticut, though he pronounced sentence of my
long banishment against me, at Cambridge, then Newtown, yet said to me
... ‘I think, Mr. Williams, I must now confess to you, that the most
wise God hath provided and cut out this part of His world for a refuge
and receptacle for all sorts of consciences. I am now under a cloud,
and my brother Hooker, with the Bay, as you have been, we have removed
from them thus far, and yet they are not satisfied.’” (_Letter to Major
Mason_ [1670], in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 133 ff.)
[41] Borgeaud, _The Rise of Modern Democracy_, p. 123.
[42] Quoted in J. T. Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 194.
[43] Walker, _Thomas Hooker, etc._, p. 122.
[44] _Ibid._, p. 125.
[45] _Ibid._, p. 88.
[46] _Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_, Introduction.
[47] _Ibid._, Part II, pp. 66, 72.
[48] _Magnalia_, Vol. II, p. 495.
[49] For the date, see _Rhode Island Historical Society_, Vol. VIII, p.
156; _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 599.
[50] The Seekers were thus described by a contemporary English pen:
“Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have
quite lost it, and go under the name of _Expecters_ and _Seekers_,
and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any
ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and
they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of
the Temple, and that they are groping for it there--where I leave them
praying to God.” (Paget, _Heresiography_; quoted in Masson, _Life of
Milton_, Vol. III, p. 153.)
[51] The Biblical authority for Separatism Williams found in
both general and specific injunctions. The former, in the second
commandment, in the third chapter of Daniel, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth chapters of Revelation--the “wine of her fornication” being
the ceremonial and ordinances of the English church--and in the Song
of Solomon. The latter were: Revelation, 18:4: “And I heard another
voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not
partakers of her sins....”; Isaiah, 53:11: “Depart ye, depart ye, go ye
out from thence, touch not the unclean thing; go ye out in the midst of
her; be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord”; II Corinthians,
6:17: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith
the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.” On
these texts he based his argument with Cotton for the total separation
of the New England churches. (See _Narragansett Club Publications_,
Vol. I, p. 300.)
[52] For much of the material made use of here, I am indebted to _The
Political Theory of Roger Williams_, a dissertation by Dr. James E.
Ernst of the University of Washington.
[53] “Letter to the Town Clerk of Providence,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 401.
[54] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol.
III, p. 349.
[55] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. IV, p. 187.
[56] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol.
III, p. 398.
[57] See _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. III, pp. 214, 355, 366.
[58] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 487.
[59] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 248.
[60] _Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 248.
[61] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 222.
[62] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 76.
[63] Preface to “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 3.
[64] _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 51.
[65] “Letter to the Town of Providence,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 263.
[66] Duguit, _Law in the Modern State_, p. 51.
[67] Gooch, _History of Democratic Ideas_, p. 80.
[68] _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 268.
[69] Masson, _Life of Milton_, Vol. II, p. 563.