Mar. 30. CHAP. the subject; and an English lawyer would have quesIX. tioned the legality of the measure. The liberty of conscience for which Williams contended, denied the 1635 right of a compulsory imposition of an oath:1 when he was summoned before the court, he could not renounce his belief; and his influence was such "that the government was forced to desist from that proceeding." To the magistrates he seemed the ally of a civil faction; to himself he appeared only to make a frank avowal of the truth. In all his intercourse with the tribunals, he spoke with the distinctness of settled convictions. He was fond of discussion; but he was never betrayed into angry remonstrance. If he was charged with pride, it was only for the novelty of his opinions. The scholar who is accustomed to the pursuits of abstract philosophy, lives in a region of thought far different from that by which he is surrounded. The range of his understanding is remote from the paths of common minds, and he is often the victim of the contrast. It is not unusual for the world to reject the voice of truth, because its tones are strange; to declare doctrines unsound, only because they are new; and even to charge obliquity or derangement on the man who brings forward principles which the selfish repudiate. Such has ever been the way of the world; and Socrates, and St. Paul, and Luther, and others of the most acute dialecticians, have been ridiculed as drivellers and madmen. The extraordinary development of one faculty may sometimes injure the balance of the mind; just as the constant exercise of one member of the body injures the beauty of its propor 1 See his opinions, fully reduced in 1647, in ii. Mass. Hist. Coll. to the form of a law, at Providence, vii. 96. ROGER WILLIAMS IN MASSACHUSETTS. 373 IX. tions; or as the exclusive devotedness to one pursuit, CHAP. politics for instance, or money, brushes away from conduct and character the agreeable varieties of light 1635. and shade. It is a very ancient remark, that folly has its corner in the brain of every wise man; and certain it is, that not the poets only, like Tasso, but the clearest minds, Sir Isaac Newton, Pascal, Spinoza, have been deeply tinged with insanity. Perhaps Williams pursued his sublime principles with too scrupulous minuteness; it was at least natural for Bradford and his contemporaries, while they acknowledged his power as a preacher, to esteem him "unsettled in judgment.” The court at Boston remained as yet undecided ; when the church of Salem,-those who were best acquainted with Williams,—taking no notice of the recent investigations, elected him to the office of their teacher. Immediately the evils inseparable on a religious establishment began to be displayed. The ministers got together and declared any one worthy of banishment, who should obstinately assert, that "the civil magistrate might not intermeddle even to stop a church from apostasy and heresy;" the magistrates delayed action, only that a committee of divines might have time to repair to Salem and deal with him and with July the church in a church way. Meantime, the people of Salem were blamed for their choice of a religious guide; and a tract of land, to which they had a claim, was withheld from them as a punishment. The breach was therefore widened. To the ministers Williams frankly, but temperately, explained his doctrines; and he was armed at all points for their defence. As his townsmen had lost their lands in consequence of their attachment to him, it would have been cowardice on his part to have abandoned them; 8. CHAP. and the instinct of liberty led him again to the suggesIX. tion of a proper remedy. In conjunction with the 1635. church, he wrote "letters of admonition unto all the churches whereof any of the magistrates were members, that they might admonish the magistrates of their injustice." The church members alone were freemen; Williams, in modern language, appealed to the people, and invited them to instruct their representatives to do justice to the citizens of Salem. This last act seemed flagrant treason;1 and at the next general court, Salem was disfranchised till an ample apology for the letter should be made. The town acquiesced in its wrongs, and submitted; not an individual remained willing to justify the letter of remonstrance; the church of Williams would not avow his great principle of the sanctity of conscience; even his wife, under a delusive idea of duty, was for a season influenced to disturb the tranquillity of his home by her reproaches.2 Williams was left alone, absolutely alone. Anticipating the censures of the colonial churches, he declared himself no longer subjected to their spiritual jurisdiction. My own voluntary withdrawing from all these churches, resolved to continue in persecuting the witnesses of the Lord, presenting light unto them, I confess it was mine own voluntary act; yea, I hope the act of the Lord Jesus, sounding forth in me the blast, which shall in his own holy season cast down the strength and confidence of Oct. those inventions of men."3 When summoned to appear before the general court, he avowed his convictions in the presence of the representatives of the state, “maintained the rocky strength of his grounds," and 1 Cotton calls it crimen majestatis laesae, 2 Master John Cotton's Reply, 9. 3 Cotton's Letter Examined, 3. ROGER WILLIAMS IN MASSACHUSETTS. 375 IX. declared himself "ready to be bound and banished and CHAP. even to die in New England," rather than renounce the opinions which had dawned upon his mind in the clearness of light. At a time when Germany was the battle-field for all Europe in the implacable wars of religion; when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions; when France was still to go through the fearful struggle with bigotry; when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance; almost half a century before William Penn became an American proprietary; and two years before Descartes founded modern philosophy on the method of free reflection,-Roger Williams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty. It became his glory to found a state upon that principle, and to stamp himself upon its rising institutions, in characters so deep that the impress has remained to the present day, and, can never be erased without the total destruction of the work. The principles which he first sustained amidst the bickerings of a colonial parish, next asserted in the general court of Massachusetts, and then introduced into the wilds on Narragansett Bay, he soon found occasion to publish to the world, and to defend as the 1644 basis of the religious freedom of mankind; so that, borrowing the rhetoric employed by his antagonist in derision, we may compare him to the lark, the pleasant bird of the peaceful summer, that, "affecting to soar aloft, springs upward from the ground, takes his rise from pale to tree," and at last, surmounting the highest hills, utters his clear carols through the skies of morning.1 He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of 1 John Cotton's Reply, 2 CHAP. conscience, the equality of opinions before the law, IX. and in its defence he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor. For Taylor limited his toleration to a few Christian sects; the philanthropy of Williams compassed the earth : Taylor favored partial reform, commended lenity, argued for forbearance, and entered a special plea in behalf of each tolerable sect; Williams would permit persecution of no opinion, of no religion, leaving heresy unharmed by law, and orthodoxy unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes. Taylor still clung to the necessity of positive regulations enforcing religion and eradicating error; he resembled the poets, who, in their folly, first declare their hero to be invulnerable, and then clothe him in earthly armor: Williams was willing to leave Truth alone, in her own panoply of light,' believing that if, in the ancient feud between Truth and Error, the employment of force could be entirely abrogated, Truth would have much the best of the bargain. It is the custom of mankind to award high honors to the successful inquirer into the laws of nature, to those who advance the bounds of human knowledge. We praise the man who first analyzed the air, or resolved water into its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds; even though the discoveries may have been as much the fruits of time as of genius. A moral principle has a much wider and nearer influence on human happiness; nor can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to society, than that which establishes a perpetual religious peace, and spreads tranquillity through every community and every bosom. If Copernicus is held in perpetual reverence, because, on his death-bed, he published to the world that the 1 The expression is partly from Gibbon and Sir Henry Vane. |