Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty

by Arthur Barsazou Strickland

THE TORCH-BEARERS OF THE IDEAL
OF ROGER WILLIAMS UNTIL LIBERTY
ENLIGHTENED THE WORLD

I believe all our Baptist ministers in town, except two, and most of our brethren in the country were on the side of the Americans in the late dispute.... To this hour we believe that the independence of America will, for a while, secure the liberty of this country, but if that continent had been reduced, Britain would not have long been free.—Doctor Rippon, of London, England, to President Manning, of Rhode Island College, written in 1784.

Nor need any one dream that Jefferson and Madison could have carried this measure by their genius and influence. They were opposed by many men whose transcendent services, or unequalled oratory, or wealth, position, financial interests, or intense prejudices would have enabled them easily to resist their unsupported assaults. Like a couple of first-class engineers on a tender with a train attached, but no locomotive, would Jefferson and Madison have appeared without the Baptists. They furnished the locomotive for these skilled engineers which drew the train of religious liberty through every persecuting enactment in the penal code of Virginia.—Wm. Cathcart, D. D., in “The Baptists and the American Revolution.”

The Baptists were the first and only religious denomination that struck for independence from Great Britain, and the first and only one that made a move for religious liberty before independence was declared.... Of those who took part in the struggle for religious liberty, the Baptists were the only denomination that maintained a consistent record and held out without wavering until the end—until every vestige of the old establishment had been obliterated by the sale of the glebes.—Dr. Charles James, in “Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia.”

WE have seen the early struggles of Roger Williams. We have seen the halo of glory which clusters about the State he founded. We have seen his place in the plans of a Divine providence. We have also seen his place in the procession of heroes who held aloft the torch of religious and soul-liberty throughout the ages. When by death, he was compelled to drop that torch, others took it up and continued the procession until the first amendment to our National Constitution became a fact of history. The Baptists led the historic movement in all the colonies which stood for this principle of “Religious Liberty.” Oscar S. Straus says:

The Baptists ... had a much more enlightened and advanced view: they held that Christianity should propagate itself by its own spiritual force; that the civil government was entirely apart and distinct and should have no control over conscience, or power to inflict punishment for spiritual censures.

Professor Gervinus, professor at Heidelberg, Germany, about the year 1850, published a work, in which he referred to Williams and his ideal:

Roger Williams urged an entire liberty of conscience in Massachusetts. He was obliged to fly from the country, and in 1636 he founded a small new society in Rhode Island upon the principles of entire liberty of conscience. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain a general elective franchise and entire religious liberty would be of short duration. But these institutions have spread from that petty state over the whole union. They superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and New York, the High-church part of Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe; and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe.

For the publication of such sentiments, Professor Gervinus was tried at Mannheim and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment and to have his books publicly burned.

Back of political progress there must be spiritual strength. Back of the final victory of religious liberty in America there was not only the glorious example of Rhode Island as a political demonstration but the persistent propagation of the ideals in all the States. This was chiefly the task of the Baptists, many of whose churches could trace their origin to settlers from Rhode Island.