This flagrant wrong induced Mr. Williams and his church to write admonitory letters to the churches of which these magistrates were members, requesting them to admonish the magistrates of the criminality of their conduct, it being a “breach of the rule of justice.” The letters were thus addressed because the members of the churches were the only freemen, and the only parties interested in the civil government of the colony. They were without effect. His own people began to waver under the pressure of ministerial power and influence. Mr. Williams’s health too gave way, “by his excessive labours, preaching thrice a week, by labours night and day in the field; and by travels night and day to go and come from the Court.” Even his wife added to his affliction by her reproaches, “till at length he drew her to partake with him in the error of his way.”[23] He now declared his intention to withdraw communion from all the churches in the Bay, and from Salem also if they would not separate with him. His friend Endicot was imprisoned for justifying the letter of admonition, and Mr. Sharpe was summoned to appear to answer for the same. In October he was called before the Court for the last time. All the ministers were present. They had already decided “that any one was worthy of banishment who should obstinately assert, that the civil magistrate might not intermeddle even to stop a church from apostacy and heresy.”[24] His letters were read, which he justified; he maintained all his opinions. After a disputation with Mr. Hooker, who could not “reduce him from any of his errors,” he was sentenced to banishment in six weeks, all the ministers, save one, approving of the deed.[25]
Before proceeding to detail the subsequent events of his history, it will be necessary to make a few remarks on the topics of accusation brought against Mr. Williams, and especially since they are often referred to in the pages of the works now in the reader’s hands.
The causes of his banishment are given by Mr. Williams in p. 375 of this volume, with which agrees Governor Winthrop’s testimony cited above. Mr. Cotton, however, does not concur in this statement: the two last causes he denies, giving as his reason, “that many are known to hold both those opinions, and are yet tolerated not only to live in the commonwealth, but also in the fellowship of the churches.” The other two points, he likewise asserts, were held by some, who yet were permitted to enjoy both civil and church liberties.[26] What then were the grounds of this harsh proceeding according to Mr. Cotton? They were as follows:—“Two things there were, which to my best observation, and remembrance, caused the sentence of his banishment: and two other fell in, that hastened it. 1. His violent and tumultuous carriage against the patent.... 2. The magistrates, and other members of the general Court upon intelligence of some episcopal and malignant practices against the country, they made an order of Court to take trial of the fidelity of the people, not by imposing upon them, but by offering to them, an oath of fidelity. This oath when it came abroad, he vehemently withstood it, and dissuaded sundry from it, partly because it was, as he said, Christ’s prerogative to have his office established by oath: partly because an oath was a part of God’s worship, and God’s worship was not to be put upon carnal persons, as he conceived many of the people to be.” The two concurring causes were:—1. That notwithstanding his “heady and turbulent spirit,” which induced the magistrates to advise the church at Salem not to call him to the office of teacher, yet the major part of the church made choice of him. And when for this the Court refused Salem the parcel of land, Mr. Williams stirred up the church to unite with him in letters of admonition to the churches “whereof those magistrates were members, to admonish them of their open transgression of the rule of justice.” 2. That when by letters from the ministers the Salem church was inclined to abandon their teacher, Mr. Williams renounced communion with Salem and all the churches in the Bay, refused to resort to public worship, and preached to “sundry who began to resort to his family,” on the Lord’s day.[27]
On examination, it is evident that the two statements do not materially differ. Mr. Williams held the patents to be sinful “wherein Christian kings, so called, are invested with right by virtue of their Christianity, to take and give away the lands and countries of other men.”[28] It were easy to represent opposition to the patent of New England as overthrowing the foundation on which colonial laws were framed, and as a denial of the power claimed by the ministers and the General Court “to erect such a government of the church as is most agreeable to the word.” Such was Mr. Cotton’s view, and which he succeeded in impressing on the minds of the magistrates. Mr. Williams may perhaps have acquired somewhat of his jealousy concerning these patents from the instructions of Sir Edward Coke, who so nobly withstood the indiscriminate granting of monopolies in the parliament of his native land.[29] There can be no question that Williams was substantially right. His own practice, when subsequently laying the basis for the state of Rhode Island, evinces the equity, uprightness, and generosity of his motives. Perhaps too his views upon the origin of all governmental power may have had some influence in producing his opposition. He held that the sovereignty lay in the hands of the people. No patent or royal rights could therefore be alleged as against the popular will. That must make rulers, confirm the laws, and control the acts of the executive. Before it patents, privileges, and monopolies, the exclusive rights of a few, must sink away.
Moreover, it is clear, from Cotton’s own statement, that this question of the patent involved that of religious liberty. The colony claimed under it the right of erecting a church, of framing an ecclesiastical polity: and it exercised it. Ecclesiastical laws were made every whit as stringent as the canons of the establishment of the mother country. Already we have seen that church members alone could be freemen. Every adult person was compelled to be present at public congregational worship, and to support both ministry and church with payment of dues enforced by magisterial power.[30] “Three months was, by the law, the time of patience to the excommunicate, before the secular power was to deal with him:” then the obstinate person might be fined, imprisoned, or banished. Several persons were banished for noncompliance with the state religion.[31] In 1644, a law was promulgated against the baptists, by which “it is ordered and agreed, that if any person or persons, within this jurisdiction, shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptizing of infants,” or seduce others, or leave the congregation during the administration of the rite, they “shall be sentenced to banishment.” The same year we accordingly find that a poor man was tied up and whipped for refusing to have his child sprinkled.[32] Heresy, blasphemy, and some other the like crimes, exposed the culprit to expatriation. It was against this course that Mr. Williams afterwards wrote his “Bloudy Tenent;” and through the “sad evil” “of the civil magistrates dealing in matters of conscience and religion, as also of persecuting and hunting any for any matter merely spiritual and religious,” which he opposed, was he banished.[33]
The question of the patent could not therefore be discussed in the General Court without involving a discussion upon religious liberty. Mr. Cotton has chosen to make most prominent, in his articles of accusation, the question of the origin of the patent; the magistrate, whose statement is adduced by Mr. Williams, places in the forefront that of the magistrate’s power over conscience. As the matter stood, these two subjects were allied. To doubt the one was to doubt the other. But Mr. Williams was decided as to the iniquity of both.
On the subject of the denial of the oath of fidelity, it is evident, from Mr. Cotton’s statement, that the oath owed its origin to intolerance. Episcopacy should have no place under congregational rule, no more than independency could be suffered to exist under the domination of the English hierarchy. But Mr. Williams appears to have objected to the oath chiefly on other grounds: it was allowed by all parties that oath-taking was a religious act. If so, it was concluded by Mr. Williams, in entire consistency with his other views, that, 1, It ought not to be forced on any, so far as it was religious; nor, 2, could an unregenerate man take part in what was thought to be an act of religious worship. Whether an oath be a religious act, we shall not discuss; but on the admitted principles of the parties engaged in this strife, Mr. Williams’s argument seems to us irrefragable.
On the concurring causes referred to by Mr. Cotton, it will be unnecessary to make extended comment. The first of these is treated of at length in the second piece of this volume. Mr. Cotton and Mr. Williams were representatives of the two great bodies of dissentients from the law-established church of England. One party deemed it to be an anti-christian church, its rites to be avoided, its ministry forsaken, its communion abjured: these were the Separatists, or true Nonconformists, to whom Mr. Williams belonged.[34] The other party, although declaiming against the supposed corruptions of the church, loved its stately service, its governmental patronage, its common prayer, and its parishional assemblies:[35] these were the puritans who, in New England, became Independents, or Congregationalists[36]—in Old England, during the Commonwealth, chiefly Presbyterians, and some Independents: to these Mr. Cotton belonged.
Mr. Williams thought it his duty to renounce all connection with the oppressor of the Lord’s people, and also with those who still held communion with her.[37] Let us not deem him too rigid in these principles of separation. There can be no fellowship between Christ and Belial. And if, as was indeed the case, the Anglican church too largely exhibited those principles which were subversive of man’s inalienable rights, exercised a tyrannous and intolerable sway over the bodies and consciences of the people, and drove from her fold, as outcasts, many of her best and holiest children,—it is no wonder that they should in return regard her touch as polluting, her ecclesiastical frame as the work of anti-christ. The Congregationalists introduced her spirit and practice into the legislation of the New World, and it behoved every lover of true liberty to stand aloof and separate from the evil. This did Mr. Williams. He was right in regarding the relation of the Congregational polity to the civil state in New England as implicitly a national church state, although that relation was denied to be explicitly national by Mr. Cotton and his brethren. “I affirm,” said Williams, “that that church estate, that religion and worship which is commanded, or permitted to be but one in a country, nation, or province, that church is not in the nature of the particular churches of Christ, but in the nature of a national or state church.”[38]