He was a Welchman—for he had been cradled in the crags of Carmarthen—some thirty years of age, ripe for great acts, and though sometime a minister of the English church, he had thrown up his living because he could not, in Milton’s phrase, “subscribe him slave,” by conforming to Laud’s idea.[819]
He had heard of America as a land of splendid possibilities—as the Holy Land of a grander crusade than that which had been launched to clutch the East from beneath the Saracenic scimetars; for this meant not empty sentimentality, it was an effort to win the wilderness for God. In that essay he longed to share; and his quick-flowing blood, his bold energy, and what Winthrop called his “godly fervor,” united to decide him to quit England, cramped in forms and chained in wrongs, for the young, elastic, unbounded freedom of the west of the Atlantic.
Roger Williams was an earnest seeker after truth. Like Robinson, he smiled at the idea that the acme of knowledge had been reached. He knew, moreover, that his goal was to be run for “not without toil and heat.” He was romantically conscientious; but he held to his opinions with grim determination, while the slowly-ripening principles of the English revolution of 1640 had already flowered in his brain. Now, in New England, he longed to set his ideas on two feet, and bid them run across the continent.
Like all positive characters, the young Welchman speedily attracted attention and made himself felt. His clear, ringing heel had scarce sounded in Boston streets ere he was cordoned by friends and surrounded by foes.[820] His opinions were novel; some of them have been grafted into the fundamental law of our Republic, and are now justly considered the palladium of religious peace; others are still unsettled and partly unaccepted, being held by certain sects, and rejected by several as the disjecta membra of divinity; but to the Pilgrims they were alike odious and revolutionary.
But the principle upon which hangs his immortality of fame is that of complete toleration. “He was a Puritan, and a fugitive from English persecution,” remarks Bancroft, “but his wrongs had not clouded his accurate understanding. In the capacious recesses of his mind he had revolved the nature of intolerance, and he, and he alone, had arrived at the grand principle which is its sole effectual remedy. He announced his discovery under the simple proposition of the sanctity of conscience. The civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control opinion; should punish guilt, but never violate the freedom of the soul. The doctrine contained within itself an entire reformation of theological jurisprudence; it would blot from the statute-book the felony of non-conformity; would quench the fires that persecution had so long kept burning; would repeal every law compelling attendance on public worship; would abolish tithes and all forced contributions to the maintenance of religion; would give an equal protection to every form of religious faith; and never suffer the authority of civil government to be enlisted against the mosque of the Mussulman, or the altar of the fire-worshipper; the Jewish synagogue, or the Roman cathedral. It is wonderful with what distinctness Roger Williams deduced these inferences from his central tenet, the consistency with which, like Pascal and Edwards, those bold and profound reasoners on other subjects, he accepted every fair inference from his doctrine, and the circumspection with which he repelled every unjust imputation. In the unwavering assertion of these views he never changed his position; the sanctity of conscience was the great tenet, which, with all its consequences, he defended as he first trod the shores of New England; and in his extreme old age it was the last pulsation of his heart. But it placed the young emigrant in direct opposition to the whole system on which Massachusetts was founded; and forbearing and forgiving as was his temper, prompt as he was to concede every thing which honesty permitted, he always asserted his belief, however unpalatable it might be, with temperate firmness and an unbending benevolence.”[821] And just here, it is only fair to add, that his opponents, on their part, usually applied their principles without personal animosity. Between Williams and his great antagonist, Cotton, there was always, in their most heated moods, a substratum of cordial respect, while Winthrop, though consenting to the banishment of the pioneer American reformer, continued his fast friend through all.[822]
This principle of toleration, together with several other obnoxious tenets, all of which Williams avowed with frank courage, soon brought him under the frown of the colonial authorities—a frown which deepened when he refused to unite with the church at Boston “because its members would not make public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the church of England before their emigration.”[823]
This declaration—and the same thing may be said of several of his tenets—looks narrow and bigoted in our eyes; but Roger Williams had an undoubted right to cherish his own views under the very principles which he first of all men in America proclaimed, that “the public or the magistrate may decide what is due from man to man, but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they are out of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear, that if the magistrate has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs to-day and another to-morrow; as has been done in England by different kings and queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman church; so that belief would become a heap of confusion.”[824]
Be this as it may, the Pilgrims came to regard Roger Williams as a dangerous heresiarch; as “unsettled in judgment;”[825] as carrying “a windmill in his head.”[826] Indeed, so strong was this feeling that many years afterwards Cotton Mather headed his account of Williams’ advent, in the “Magnalia,” with this Latin: “Hic se aperit Diabolus”—Here the devil shows himself.[827]
Under these circumstances, we may easily imagine the consternation which reigned in Boston, when, in April, 1631, it was rumored that Roger Williams was about to be installed in the vacant place of Francis Higginson at Salem as assistant to Mr. Skelton.[828] The court was convened; and a letter was at once indited to John Endicott, “one of the chief promoters of the settlement,” in which, says Winthrop, the judges “marvelled that he should countenance such a choice without advising with the Council; and withal desiring him to use his influence that the Salem church should forbear till all could confer about it.”[829]
In that day good ministers were not common in New England; and, moreover, the Salem churchmen liked Williams; so, without heeding the remonstrance of the authorities, they proceeded to settle the teacher of their choice. He at once began to preach; but with the advance of summer the temper of the government grew hot with the season, and finally he decided to bid Salem farewell and take refuge at Plymouth.[830] This he did, being soon after elected assistant to Ralph Smith.[831] At Plymouth as at Salem, he made many friends, and Bradford bears witness that he was “a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts.”[832] But his “strange opinions” were not fully approved; and consequently, when, after the death of Mr. Skelton, in 1633, the Salem church urged their truant pastor to return to them, Williams acceded. He was dismissed, as Brewster counselled, from the Plymouth church, but was followed back to Salem by a body-guard of devoted admirers, “who would have no other preacher.”[833]