While Roger Williams believed in toleration, he did not believe in license, but was always earnest for liberty regulated by law. Thus when the Ranters appeared and railed against all order, he invoked the judicial arm to suppress their madness.[870] But when the Quakers invaded the state, he attacked them only with syllogisms. He was ardently opposed to their tenets; but he essayed to “dig George Fox out of his burrows” with words only, and returned a stern “No” to the thrice-repeated request of Massachusetts that they be expelled from his jurisdiction.[871] “We find,” he wrote, “that where these people are most of all supposed to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by argument, there they least of all desire to come.”[872]
In 1643, Williams went to England to obtain a charter for his plantation. He “found all in a flame; civil war raging, Hampden just killed, Charles fled from London, and the city and the government in the hands of the Parliament.” Here he lived on intimate terms with Sir Harry Vane and Milton, kindred spirits, who were doing in England what he had done in America. His mission was successful, and a twelvemonth later he returned to Providence with a liberal patent, the free-will offering of jubilant democracy across the water.[873]
Eight years later, under the Protectorate, Roger Williams once more visited England on colonial business; and his admission and recognition among the foremost thinkers of the time were general and hearty. The acquaintance with Vane and Milton was continued, and Marvell and Cromwell were added to his list of friends.[874] But his heart was in America, and in 1654 he came back to Providence;[875] whereupon he was elected president of the cluster of plantations which, in after-days, were moulded into the little state of Rhode Island.[876]
For many years Williams and his colony were under the frown of their brother Pilgrims; but through it all they bore cheerily up, trusting to God, time, and success, to remove all prejudice, and “keeping always to that one principle, ‘that every man should have liberty to worship God according to the light of his own conscience.’”[877]
Roger Williams had learned that most difficult of lessons, to return good for evil. He never wearied in well-doing; and his fine tact, broad statesmanship, and friendly zeal, on more than one occasion came between the colonists who had flung him into dishonorable banishment and impending harm.[878] With the Indians he was singularly influential, and frequently his presence at their camp-fires and in their wigwams served to explode a maturing conspiracy.[879]
On the Restoration, an event occurred which finely illustrates the beautiful text, that “He who goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” The American republican had been the warm friend and coadjutor of Cromwell, and Milton, and Pym. When Charles II. came to the throne, all looked to see his hand stretched across the Atlantic to menace and chastise. It was outstretched, but only to bless; for the foppish Stuart actually renewed the charter which the wise Protector had first granted to the Providence plantations. He paid unconscious homage to the principle of Roger Williams, and assented to what Gammel calls “the freest paper that ever bore the signature of a king—the wonder of the age.”[880]
Such was one instance of the influence of a man whose beneficent career is at once an example and an inspiration; not because he was always right or always wise, but because he was always true to his own ideal. Roger Williams was the initiator of many changes; and he, first of all in America, boldly framed the creed of democracy. But the brightest jewel in his crown is that he, taking his life in one hand and his good name in the other, “was the first reformer in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of all opinions before the law. At a time when Germany was the battle-field for all Europe in the implacable wars of religion; when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions; when France was still to go through a fearful struggle with bigotry; when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance; almost half a century before William Penn became an American proprietary; and two years before Descartes founded modern philosophy on the basis of free reflection,” Roger Williams demanded the enfranchisement of the human soul.
“We praise the man who first analyzed the air, or resolved water into its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds, even though the discoveries may have been as much the fruits of time as of genius. A moral principle has a much wider and nearer influence on human happiness; nor can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to society than that which establishes perpetual religious peace, and spreads tranquillity through every community and every bosom.
“If Copernicus is held in everlasting reverence because, on his death-bed, he published to the world that the sun is the centre of our system; if the name of Kepler is preserved in the annals of human excellence for his sagacity in detecting the laws of planetary motion; if the genius of Newton has been almost adored for dissecting a ray of light and weighing heavenly bodies in a balance—let there be for the name of Roger Williams at least some humble place among those who have advanced moral science, and made themselves the benefactors of mankind.”[881]