Chapter THE SECOND: The Prophet of Religious Freedom (2)

In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never was a noble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial. Cotton aptly dubbed him "a haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month, lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as "52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting words, or with the Latin "_ut vulgo_." What quarrel the tender conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness and hearty friendship. But his conscience does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellowship with the man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend. Once at least he guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your worship's faithful and affectionate in all _civil_ bonds." It would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if these minute restrictions had been a source of annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist.

[Sidenote: Williams becomes a Seeker.]

[Sidenote: Note 24.]

Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was the mainspring of the High-church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and still more the goal of the Separatist. One party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of institutions that had grown up in the ages and in getting back to the primitive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possibilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism; he had now swung round to where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker.

[Sidenote: The Seekers.]

Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they were sanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time. The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a resting place for many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism until he had passed out on the other side into the region of devout and contented uncertainty.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Moral elevation of Williams]

In all this Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and that not because of intellectual superiority--for he had no large philosophical views--but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions about the character of the savages--he styles them "wolves endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane treatment of them. All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not make him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England."

[Sidenote: Superior to the age.]

Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-shining inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams. In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.

[Sidenote: His prophetic character.]

This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever clearer as the ages go on.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 268.]

Sir William Martin, an early friend of Williams, describes him as passionate and precipitate, but with integrity and good intentions. Hutchinson Papers, 106. See also, for example, the two letters of Williams to Lady Barrington, in New England Genealogical Register, July, 1889, pp. 316 and following.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 269.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, 25th March, 1671. "He knows what gains and preferments I have refused in universities, city, country and court," etc. Williams's enthusiastic nature gave a flush of color to his statement of ordinary fact, the general correctness of which, however, there is never reason to doubt.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 270.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 356. There is no account of this event elsewhere, but the church records of that early date are imperfect, and there is every reason to accept the circumstantial statement of Williams. That he refused to enter into membership with the church is confirmed by Winthrop's Journal, 12th April, 1631, and such refusal must have had some such occasion.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 271.]

"We have often tried your patience, but could never conquer it," were Winthrop's words to Williams, who gave to Massachusetts lifelong service in return for its lifelong severity toward him. The sentence is quoted in Williams's letter to the younger Cotton, cited above, which is itself a fine example of his magnanimity of spirit. Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 351-357.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 272.]

There is difference of opinion on this point, but certain words of Williams himself seem to bear on it. After his retirement from Salem to Plymouth he received a letter from Winthrop, which appears to have intimated that no man under twenty-five ought to be ordained. Williams explains in reply that he is "nearer upwards of thirty than twenty-five," but avers, "I am no elder in any church ... nor ever shall be, if the Lord please to grant my desires that I may intend what I long after, the natives souls." Williams's Letter, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 2. Of course, these words might have been written if he had resigned the eldership before leaving Salem, but they would have had much less pertinency.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 276.]

Mr. Straus, in his Life of Roger Williams, says aptly that Massachusetts was under a government of congregations rather than of towns, since only church members could vote. A fuller discussion of the source and evolution of the town system is deferred to a later volume of this series.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 278.]

David Pieterzen de Vries, in his Voyages, reports this feeling of superiority as freely expressed at Hartford in 1639. There is a quaint humor in what he says of it that is enhanced by the naïve Dutch phrase in which it is set down: "Dit Volck gaven haer uyt det sy Israëliten waren, ende dat wy aen onse colonie Egyptenaren waren, end' Engelsen inde Vergienies waren mede Egyptenaren," p. 151.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 279.]

"And such was the authority ... Mr. Cotton had in the hearts of the people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." Hubbard, History of Massachusetts, 182.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 281.]

Knowles's Life of Williams, 58, note, quotes from a letter of Coddington's appended to Fox's reply to Williams, in which Coddington, who was one of the magistrates that examined the treatise, charges Williams with having "written a quarto against the King's patent and authority."

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 288.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38. I have followed Cotton implicitly here, but without feeling sure that his memory can ever be depended on where his polemical feeling is concerned. On the next page he is guilty of a flagrant but no doubt unconscious suppression of an important fact. "It pleased the Lord to open the hearts of the Church to assist us," etc., he says, putting out of sight the sharp dealing by which the Salem church was brought to ignominious subjection.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 289.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Massachusetts Records of 4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement to take the oath is offered by making the regulations for recording the lands of freemen apply also to the lands of "residents" presumably not church members and ineligible to the franchise, but only to the residents "that had taken or shall hereafter take their oathes." Backus supposes that Williams saw some incidental result from the oath that would be prejudicial to religious freedom. This is to suppose that Williams needed a practical consideration to stir him to action--it is to suppose that Williams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the independence of Massachusetts would be lost; Roger Williams was only afraid that Massachusetts would commit a public sin in trying to escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled was his objective point in private and public life; safety, public or private, was secondary.

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 292.]

There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by Cotton first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court since, to prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a cause of his banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, the decree would have been more comprehensible and defensible in view of the opinions of the age. But the question about the validity of the patent, the question of the protest written against the course of the magistrates in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to support him, the question of the freeman's oath, and, what seems to have been deemed of capital importance, the question of grace after meat, are all involved at one time or another. The formal charges in what may be considered the beginning of the banishment proceedings, the trial in July, as given by Winthrop, our most trustworthy authority, are: 1. That the magistrates ought not to punish for a religious offense--"the breach of the first table"--except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2. That the magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 4. That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after meat. Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings in October, the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to Salem its outlying land entered into and embittered the controversy. Winthrop, i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the divulging "of dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against the aucthoritie of the magistrate" the first offense, and the "letter of defamacion" the second. Williams says that a magistrate, who appears to have been Haynes, the governor, summed up his offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four heads: 1. The denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of the lawfulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray. 3. The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in England. 4. The doctrine "that the Civill Magistrates' power extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward State of men." Against the evidence of Williams, Winthrop, and the records, I can not attach any importance to the halting accounts given years afterward, for controversial purposes, by Cotton, from what he thought was his memory.

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 292.]

"Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church at Salem, hath broached and dyvulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also writt letters of defamacion both of the magistrates & Churches here, & that before any conviccion, & yet maintaineth the same without retraccion, it is therefore ordered that the said Mr. Williams shall departe out of this jurisdiccion within sixe weekes now nexte ensueing, which if hee neglect to performe it shall be lawfull for the Gouernour & two of the magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccion, not to returne any more without license from the Court." Massachusetts Records, i, 161.

[Sidenote: Note 14, page 293.]

Neal's History of New England, i, 143. "Sentence of banishment being read against Mr. Williams, the whole town of Salem was in an uproar; for such was the Popularity of the Man and such the Compassion of the People ... that he would have carried off the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Town if the Ministers of Boston had not interposed." Neal appears to derive these facts, which wear a countenance of probability, from an authority not now known.

[Sidenote: Note 15, page 293.]

The phrase occurs in Williams's noble letter to Major Mason, 1st Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, i, 275 and following. The magnanimity shown toward those opposed to him in this letter is probably without a parallel in his age; it has few in any age.

[Sidenote: Note 16, page 294.]

"The increase of the concourse of people to him on the Lord's days in private, to the neglect or deserting of publick Ordinances and to the spreading of the Leaven of his corrupt imaginations, provoked the Magistrates rather than to breed a winters Spirituale plague in the Countrey, to put upon him a winter's journey out of the Countrey." Master John Cotton's Answer to Master Roger Williams, 57.

[Sidenote: Note 17, page 297.]

The main original authorities on the banishment of Williams are Winthrop's Journal and the Massachusetts Records of the period. Some facts can be gathered from the writings of Williams, whose autobiographical passages always have an air of truth while they are sometimes vague and often flushed by his enthusiastic temper. Cotton's memory is less to be trusted; some of his statements are in conflict with better authorities. He no doubt believed himself to be truthful, but his ingenious mind was unable to be precise without unconscious sophistication. Hubbard was of Presbyterian tendencies and totally opposed to all forms of Separatism. He appears to have recorded every exaggerated rumor cherished by Williams's antagonists to his discredit. Neither in this nor in other matters can we rely much on Hubbard's testimony. No critical student of history puts unquestioning confidence in Cotton Mather. His strange mind could never utter truth unvarnished. In a case like this, where family pride, local feeling, and sectarian prejudice were all on one side, and where he had a chance to embroider upon traditions already two generations old, it is better to disregard the author of the Magnalia entirely. Bentley's Historical Account of Salem, in 1st Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, vi, is a paper that excites admiration for its broadmindedness. It contains information not elsewhere to be found, but it is impossible to tell how far Bentley depended upon sources not now accessible and how far he relied on ingenious inferences drawn from his large knowledge of local history. The publications of the Narragansett Club contain the whole controversy between Cotton and Williams and all the letters of the latter now known to be extant. I have in some cases referred to the originals, in others I have used these careful reprints. Williams has been rather fortunate in his biographers. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, approaching the subject from a fresh standpoint, has produced the latest Life of Williams, written in a judicial temper and evincing a rare sympathy with its subject. The character of Williams has never been better drawn than by Mr. Straus, pp. 231-233. The life by T. D. Knowles is perhaps the best of the older biographies, Arnold's History of Rhode Island contains a sketch of Williams, and Elton's brief biography has a value of its own. Gammell's Life in Sparks's Biography is generally fair. "As to Roger Williams," by the late Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, is, what it pretends to be, a partisan statement of the case against Williams. It shows characteristic thoroughness of research, it clears up many minor points, and is as erudite as it is one-sided.

[Sidenote: Note 18, page 298.]

Baylie's Sermon before the House of Lords, on Errours and Induration, accuses the Dutch of mere worldly policy in toleration. Williams alludes to the charge, Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 8. But the toleration of Holland may rather be traced to that decay of bigotry and that widening of view which are beneficent results of an extended trade. Williams in the Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 10, complains of the exclusion of Catholics and Arminians from toleration in the Netherlands. It would carry us beyond the range of the present work to inquire how far the toleration of Amsterdam was related to that "meridian glory" which Antwerp reached as early as 1550 by making itself a place of refuge for the persecuted of England, France, and Germany. The Articles of Union, adopted at Utrecht in 1579, which have been often called the Magna Charta of the Dutch, go to show that political and commercial considerations counted in favor of toleration, but they also show that some notion of the sacredness of the free conscience had been adopted among the Dutch. Article XIII of the Union provides that the states of Holland and Zealand shall conduct their religious affairs as they think good. More qualified arrangements are made for the other states, as that they may restrict religious liberty as they shall find needful for the repose and welfare of the country. But this significant provision is added, that every man shall have freedom of private belief without arrest or inquisition: "Midts dat een yder particulier in syn Religie vry zal moghen blyven, ende dat men niemandt, ter cause van de Religie, zal moghen achterhalen, ofte ondersoecken." Pieter Paulus Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, i, 229, 230. Compare Van Meteren, Nederlandsche Historie etc., iii, 254, 255, and Hooft Nederlandsche Historie, etc.,