But “Williams could not keep quiet in this seething world,” affirms Elliot; “nor could Endicott. Both of them saw the inevitable tendencies of the Roman church; and feeling that such a church was dangerous to their infant liberties, they decided that the symbol under which the pope and Laud marched should not be their symbol: so Endicott cut the cross out of the king’s colors. At such a crisis, when the aim was to ‘avoid and protract,’ this audacious act of course made trouble; and Endicott, at the next court, was ‘sadly admonished,’ and disabled from office for a year.[847] Williams held peculiar views respecting oaths, and cited the Scripture command—‘swear not at all.’ And as the freeman’s oath clashed with the oath to the king, he also spoke against that, and dissuaded some from taking it.”[848]
Besides this, Roger Williams was an avowed democrat. He proclaimed this truth: “Kings and magistrates are invested with no more power than the people intrust to them.”[849] And he said again: “The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.”[850] Republicanism was the logical sequence of religious liberty—came from it as naturally as the bud expands into the flower. Yet it startled the Pilgrims. They were constantly making forays into the domain of absolutism. They never scrupled, when they had a chance, at clutching popular prerogatives. They were always busy in enacting democracy into law; but they were shocked when Roger Williams put it into propositions.
“Had Cromwell been in power at the time, with his republican bias,” remarks Felt, “these sentiments would have been crowned with approbation; but being uttered under one of the Stuarts, they were hissed as the expression of sedition. It has ever been in accordance with the spirit of human policy, that principles under the circumstances of one period are accounted patriotism, which under the circumstances of another era are denounced as treason.”[851]
Thus it was that the theories of Roger Williams “led him into perpetual collision with the clergy and the government of Massachusetts Bay. It had ever been their custom to respect the church of England, and in the mother-country, they had frequented its service; yet its principles and its administration were still harshly exclusive. The American reformer would hold no communion with intolerance; for, said he, ‘the doctrine of persecution for conscience’ sake is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.’
“The magistrates insisted on the presence of every man at public worship; Williams reprobated the law; the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling, seemed like requiring hypocrisy. ‘An unbelieving soul is dead in sin’—such was his argument. ‘And to force the indifferent from one worship to another, is like shifting a dead man into several changes of apparel.’ He added: ‘No one should be forced to worship, or to maintain a worship against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from those who hire him.’
“The magistrates were selected exclusively from the church-members; with equal propriety, reasoned Williams, might ‘a doctor of physic or a pilot’ be selected according to his skill in theology and his standing in the church. It was objected, that his principles subverted all good government. ‘Oh no,’ said he; ‘the commander of the vessel of state may maintain order on board the ship and see that it pursues its course steadily, even though the dissenters of the crew be not compelled to attend the public prayers of their companions.’”[852]
The Pilgrims heard all this aghast. Soon they wearied of discussion; they invoked the syllogism of the law to rebut the heresies of the bold declaimer. Williams was cited in 1635, to appear before the General Court at Boston, for examination. Taking his staff in his hand, he set out. The session was stormy. Cotton argued; others scolded; Winthrop pleaded; Endicott was wrenched away from Williams’ side; but Williams, while maintaining some odd opinions, spoke boldly for God and liberty that day, and “maintained the rocky strength of his grounds.”[853]
“To the magistrates he seemed the ally of a civil faction; to himself he appeared only to make a frank avowal of the truth. The scholar who is accustomed to the pursuits of abstract philosophy, lives in a region of thought quite remote from that by which he is surrounded. The range of his understanding is aside from the paths of common minds, and he is often the victim of the contrast. ’Tis not unusual for the world to reject the voice of truth, because its tones are strange; to declare doctrines unsound, only because they are new; and even to charge obliquity or derangement on a man who brings forward principles which the average intelligence repudiates. ’Tis the common history; Socrates, and St. Paul, and Luther, and others of the most acute dialecticians, have been ridiculed as drivellers and madmen.”[854]
Roger Williams now evinced his kinship with the martyrs for human progress, by suffering that rejection common to those who venture to project their revolutionary thoughts from the front of a century’s advance. Misunderstood and condemned, he was commanded to abjure his heresies or else expect “sentence.”[855]
Of course, he could not reject himself; therefore, saying with Job, “Though I die, I will maintain my integrity,” he uncovered his head with serene patience to “bide the pelting of the pitiless storm.” The thunderbolt soon fell. The church at Salem was coerced into abandoning the immortal pastor; and in November, 1635, he was ordered “to depart out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay within six weeks;”[856] a sentence which is said to have been mainly due to Cotton’s eloquence.[857]