Roger Williams possessed one of those rarely-gifted minds which perceives truth at a glance. Looking beyond the advancement of his age, he stood forth as the firm advocate and prophet of that diviner knowledge which is compassed by Christianity, but which the highest Christian professors, except in very rare instances, comprehend only piecemeal.
Like the rest of his suffering brethren, Roger Williams was a Puritan, and fled to America to escape persecution. Unlike them, however, amid the afflictions of persecution he had attained to a profound knowledge, either through the grasp of a great intellect, or the single-mindedness of a child-like spirit, both of which were portions of his character. He saw that the office of civil magistrate was to restrain crime, not to control opinion; to punish guilt, not to violate the freedom of the human soul.
Arrived in Massachusetts, he found the churches there not free as the gospel would make them; and great was the excitement produced by the doctrines which he promulgated—“the ill-egg of toleration,” as it was now termed. Nevertheless the people of Salem invited him to become their minister, at which the court of Boston “marvelled,” and before long his friends at Salem were required to give him up. He then withdrew to Plymouth, whence after two years he was recalled to Salem by those who could never forget his mild virtues and his great doctrines.
Controversy on controversy succeeded; the magistrates asserted their laws of intolerance, insisted on the presence of every man at public worship, in the very spirit of that intolerant and legislative religion which had driven them from their native land. Williams stood forth as the unflinching champion of religious liberty, of the sanctity of opinion and the freedom of the human mind, and as the bold assailant of soul-oppression, “the removal of which yoke,” said he, “will prove an act of righteousness to the enslaved nations.” Besides these doctrines, he so steadfastly maintained the original right of the Indians to their land, that he even questioned the validity of any grant of their territory from an English monarch to his subjects.
The teachings of this apostle of liberty were considered subversive of all good government; the ministers in a body declared “any one worthy of banishment” who should assert, as Williams had done, that magistrates ought not to interfere even to stop a church from heresy, or that an English royal grant was wanting in moral validity. A committee of divines was sent to Salem “to deal with him and the church in a church way,” and a tract of land to which the people of Salem laid claim was withheld from them as a punishment. Williams, seeing his townspeople thus suffering on his account, wrote a letter to all the churches of which these magistrates were members, asking that they might be admonished of their injustice. This was the finishing stroke to his offending. The general court proceeded to disfranchise Salem until apology should be made for the letter. All now yielded to the storm; not a voice in Salem was raised in his behalf; even his wife reproached him as an evil-doer. But Christ, his great master, had been deserted by all, even by the beloved disciple. Williams could not forget this trial of his prototype; and declared to the court before which he was arraigned that “he was ready to be bound and banished, nay, even to die in New England, rather than renounce the opinions which had dawned upon him in the clearness of light.”
The court, influenced by Cotton, pronounced against him the sentence of exile, but as winter was at hand, he was allowed to remain till spring. This reprieve gave time for the affection of his friends to revive; throngs collected to hear the beloved pastor so soon to be removed from them. Twofold value seemed now to attach to his opinions; his views began to spread; his enemies were alarmed; and it was resolved at once to remove him on board a pinnace and ship him off to England. But he was already gone. It was now the depth of winter; for fourteen weeks, he says, he was sorely tossed in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed meant; often in a stormy night he had neither food, fire, nor company, nor better lodging than a hollow tree. But God was with him through all, and cared for him; he was fed in the wilderness as the prophet had been of old. The Indians were his friends; already while residing at Plymouth he had become acquainted with their principal sachems, and studied their language until he was able to converse with them freely. Their simple hearts had opened to his apostolic virtues; the cruel chiefs of the forest declared that they loved him as their son.
And now, his flight being in the winter, he came to the Indians. Alone, and on foot, he arrived at Seekonk on the Pawtucket river, and was kindly received by Massasoit, the sachem. Seekonk lay, however, within the Plymouth grant, and this was not to be his abiding place. God, rather than man, willed not that he should remain here. In a short time he received a letter from Winslow, the governor of Plymouth, an excellent man, who was secretly his friend, “lovingly advising him, since he was fallen into the edge of their bounds, to remove to the other side of the water, where the country would be all free before him.”
ROGER WILLIAMS’ DEPARTURE FROM SALEM.
Williams received this friendly advice as the council of God, and directed his course to Narragansett Bay. In the month of June, he, and five of his friends who had followed him into exile, landed from a frail Indian canoe on a spot near the mouth of the Moshassuck river. Tradition has hallowed the spot as being near a spring of clear water, which remains to this day. Here he took up his abode, calling the place Providence, in grateful commemoration of God’s merciful providence to him in his distress. He had landed within the territory of the Narragansett Indians, the sachems of whom were the aged Canonicus and his nephew, the bold Miantonomoh, who received him kindly and granted him a settlement on their borders. Here for two years he lived, labouring not alone as a preacher of the gospel, though his daily life was a gospel sermon, but, as he himself says, “day and night, at home and abroad, on the land and the water, at the hoe and the oar for bread.” During this time he was joined by many others, and probably, also, by his wife and family. In March, 1638, he received a free gift of territory from the associate chiefs “in consideration,” say they, “of the many kindnesses and services he hath continually done for us, we do freely give unto him all that land” which is then primitively indicated by the boundary of rivers and great hills, “with its grass and meadows and fresh waters.”