He, in his replies, had been endeavoring to extenuate and excuse the conduct of the civil government, and had taken particular care to exculpate himself. It is easy, therefore, to conceive what a shock this reverend dignitary must have suffered, when his answer to the prisoner’s letter, which went in principle the full length of the most unsparing persecution, together with Williams’ reply, was published and circulated among the brethren there. He instantly raised a cry, that Williams was persecuting him, by publishing his answer to the prisoner’s letter, and commenting upon it. But he felt himself under the necessity of doing something more. His brethren in England would require some sort of justification, and one consistent with the sentiments he had already expressed in his letters to them. Hence the controversy between him and Williams, is, on the part of Cotton, a sophistical attempt to avoid the charge of persecuting for matters of conscience. We do not persecute consciences, says he, but we do punish those who commit violence on their own consciences. If the reader should be so curious as to inquire, how Mr. Cotton ascertained when a man committed violence on his own conscience, I will state his process as I understand it. When it was discovered that any member entertained opinions inconsistent with the fundamental doctrines of the order to which he belonged, he was in the first place called before the church, and admonished of his error. If he still persisted, he was summoned before the magistracy, where the charges were specified, and the magistracy determined whether he was or was not convinced in his own mind of his errors. His judges never failed to be satisfied that he was convinced. If the accused afterwards persisted in his opinions, he was considered as one committing violence on his own conscience, and treated as an incorrigible heretic and disturber of the peace, and as such banished, imprisoned, scourged, or hanged, as the enormity of his heretical opinions might require. I have necessarily given the conversation between Williams and the Plymouth elder a turn different from that of the controversy between him and Cotton; but have endeavored to preserve something of the tone of feeling which pervades the latter. I flatter myself, however, that the Plymouth elder is a more moderate man than Mr. Cotton. As a proof, hear Mr. Cotton in his own words set forth the advantages which a state derives from persecuting heretics, and the summary mode in which the civil magistrate may deal with them.
To the question of Williams, What glory to God—what good to the souls and bodies of their subjects, did these princes bring in persecuting? Mr. Cotton thus replies: “The good that is brought to princes and subjects, by the due punishment of apostate seducers and idolaters and blasphemers, is manifold.
First; it putteth away evil from the people, and cutteth off a gangrene which would spread to further ungodliness.
Secondly; It driveth away wolves from worrying and scattering the sheep of Christ; (for false teachers be wolves.)
Thirdly; Such executions upon such evil doers causeth all the country to hear and fear, and do no more such wickedness.
Fourthly; The punishments, executed upon false prophets and seducing teachers, do bring down showers of God’s blessings upon the civil state.
Fifthly; It is an honor to God’s justice that such judgments are executed.”
He says, “If there be stones in the streets the magistrate need not fetch a sword from the smith’s shop, nor a halter from the roper’s, to punish a heretic.”
It will appear that time has made no improvement upon the leading principles of Williams, as gathered from different parts of his replies to Cotton. He says that “the people are the origin of all free power in government.” “That the people are not invested by Christ Jesus with power to rule his Church.” That they can give no such power to the magistrate. “That the kingdom of Christ is spiritual”—that to introduce the civil sword into this spiritual kingdom is “to confound Heaven and earth together, and lay all upon heaps of confusion”—“Is to take Christ and make him king by force (John vi, 15)—to make his kingdom of this world—to set up a civil and temporal Israel—to bound out new earthy lands of Canaan; yea, and to set up a Spanish inquisition, in all parts of the world, to the speedy destruction of millions of souls,” &c.
Cotton says, “that when the kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of the Lord, it is not by making Christ a temporal king; but by making the temporal kingdoms nursing fathers to the Church”—“that religion was not to be propagated by the sword; but protected and preserved by it.”