Prof. Mason says:
It was, in short, from their little dingy meeting-house, somewhere in old London, that there flashed out, first in England, the absolute doctrine of religious liberty.
These of whom mention has just been made, were called General Baptists.
In 1644, the Particular Baptists issued a confession, equally explicit and clear. Religious liberty to them was the right, and good citizenship the duty, of every Christian man. Their historic confession, a confession of seven associated churches, was the first declaration, in England or in Christendom, by a body of associated churches on the question of absolute religious liberty. Many of these Baptists were imprisoned.
Many denominations which today favor religious liberty, were opposed to it in those days of Baptist persecution. For example, the Presbyterian ministers of Lancashire declared, “A toleration would be putting a sword in a madman’s hands, a cup of poison into the hand of a child, a letting loose of madmen with firebrands in their hands, etc.” The Presbyterians, then, would gladly have been a national church. The Puritans of the Bay Colony had no higher thought than a theocracy for themselves. To insure uniformity of worship in their colony they resorted to whippings, banishments, fines, and hangings. The Pilgrim Fathers were farther advanced, but historians fail to find that they had a higher ideal than to secure a freedom to worship God for themselves. They certainly never dreamed of extending an equal freedom to all who differed from them in religious opinions. John Robinson, the renowned pastor of the Pilgrims, defended earnestly the use of the magistrate’s power “to punish religious actions, he (the magistrate) being the preserver of both tables, and so to punish all breaches of both.”
By Protestants, with the exception of the Baptists, full religious toleration and liberty was feared and hated. The most advanced were far from the Baptist position. This explains the bitterness of the persecution against Roger Williams and the Baptists. In fact, Roger Williams was so far in advance of his age, and that in common with the noble host of martyred Baptists, that he seemed dwarfed in the distance. The future even more than the present time will enable us to value his and their worth.
IV
SOUL-LIBERTY AT HOME IN A
COMMONWEALTH
It is his unique title to preeminence and fame that he was the first to found an absolutely free church in an absolutely free State, and Rhode Island and Providence Plantations remain a monument of his sagacity and daring and penetration, a center from which the light of soul-liberty has radiated far and wide till it has flooded a whole continent, and shines with concentrated splendor in the constellation of States which now form the great Western Republic.—J. Gregory, a British writer on Puritanism.
Against the somber background of early New England, two figures stand above the rest—John Winthrop and Roger Williams. The first—astute, reactionary, stern—represented Moses and the law. The second—spontaneous, adaptable, forgiving—represented Christ and the individual. It is needless to say with which lay the promise and the dawn.—I. B. Richman.