they extended this moral equity to so many particulars as to make it the whole judicial law.' But the Christian law for the government of the commonwealth leaves all punishment to be governed under the sway of the natural rights of man and the highest good of the States where they are used. Hence, in adopting the Mosaic penalties they not only cast aside, in some cases, what was known as 'crown law,' but with it the common law of England. Barry puts the case forcibly, saying:

'Puritans as well as Episcopalians assumed their own infallibility; and, as Church and State were one and inseparable in Old England, they were bound together in New England; and the purity of the former was deemed indispensable to the safety of the latter. This policy was resolutely adhered to, and the laws which sanctioned it were as inflexible as the laws of the Medes and Persians.' Governor Winthrop saw his mistake when it was too late. Barry says: 'He regretted the harshness with which Roger Williams was treated; and though a zealous opponent of Mrs. Hutchinson and the enthusiastic Gorton, as he advanced in life his spirit became more catholic and he lamented the errors of the past; so that, when urged by Mr. Dudley to sign an order for the banishment of one deemed heterodox, he replied, "I have done enough of that work already."'

18

Since Jesus was sentenced to death in Asia, on the cool verdict that he was a 'just man' in whom no fault' was found, a sublimer sight has not appeared to man than that revealed in America on that crisp October morning in 1635. This master in Israel looms up head and shoulders above his Puritan judges. Without a stammer or a blush he reaches the full height of manhood; whereupon the Bay sentences him to a new leadership. In Salem God threw the mantle of William the Silent upon the shoulders of the brave Welshman. What, if Massachusetts did. lay her political sins on his head, and send her scapegoat to bear them into the desert? He was strong to carry the burden of her congregation and elders. He remembered Pilate, and quietly held the bowl for this ancient Court of the Bay to sink its sins in the shallows of a basin. He watched the experiment in the simplicity of a child's faith, in the firmness of a martyr's will, in the resignation of a cavalier, in the calmness of a hero; for God was with him.

For that hour God brought him into the world. The persecution of two worlds inspired him to discover a third, where the wicked should cease from troub ling, in that sort. A veteran before his sun had reached noon, nerved with a judicial love of liberty, fired with a hallowed zeal to liberate all the consciencebound, he is now ready to give life to a new age. Roger, get thee gone into the woods to thy work! And when alone with God may he work his will in thee!

'Speak, History. Who are life's victors? Unroll thy long annals and say,
Are they those whom the world called victors, who won the success of a day?
The martyrs, or Nero? The Spartans who fell at Thermopyla's tryst,
Or the Persians and Xerxes? His judges or Socrates? Pilate or Christ?'
W. W. STORY.

SAL

CHAPTER III.

SETTLEMENT OF RHODE ISLAND.

ALEM was filled with excitement and grief when Williams was banished, and asked what its good pastor had done to merit this cruelty at the hands of his fellow-disciples in Christ? John Cotton, snugly housed in his Boston home, severely discanted on Williams's exile as any thing but 'banishinent.' In that dreary New England winter, as his brother plunged into the depths of the forests, he spoke of it as a large and fruitful' land, in which he enjoyed simple enlargement.' But Cotton was careful not to break the command by coveting that ' enlargement' for himself, nor did he so hanker after the delicious fruits of the wilderness as to follow his brother, to rejoice with him in his tribulation. Indeed, he queries whether it was a 'punishment at all,' and one would rather catch the impression from his showing, that the Court had simply sent him on a restful excursion, in absolute dereliction of its duty to punish crime. The illustrious hero himself thought that Cotton might have seen the matter in another light, Had his soul been in my soul's case, exposed to the miseries, poverties, necessities, debts and hardships,' which he endured. The weak people of Salem also wept as if their hearts would break, that he was driven they knew not where, for they were much taken with the apprehension of his godliness.' Neal says, that the whole town was in an uproar, that they raised the 'cry of persecution,' and 'that he would have carried off the greater part of the inhabitants of the town, if the ministers of Boston had not interfered.'1 These admonished the Church at Salem for sympathizing with one who had been driven out of civilization as a felon.

Upham, the careful historian of the Salem Church, says: "They adhered to him long and faithfully, and sheltered him from all assaults. And when at last he was sentenced by the General Court to banishment from the colony on account of his principles, we cannot but admire the fidelity of that friendship which prompted many of his congregation to accompany him in his exile, and partake of his fortunes when an outcast upon the earth.' Thanks to Salem, its loss was the world's gain. That day, out of the weak came forth strength, and out of the bitter came forth sweetness. Good old Puritan city of witchcraft and halters, out of thee, as from Salem of old, went forth an illustrious exile: the first to redeem the souls of men, and the other to give fifty millions of them soul liberty. Men intended only evil in both cases, but God overruled their aims for good. His eye rested on this wanderer in the New World, and his voice told him what to do and where to go.

642

WILLIAMS IN THE DESERT.

We now follow Roger Williams into those wild tracts of nature where the wolf, the bear and the panther roamed in all their voracity. Perpetual hardships had given the wild tribes of that region compact and well-knit bodies, which could subsist for days on a handful of corn. Aside from this, with their fish and game, they had little food in the depth of winter, knowing nothing of salted meats, and often they were sorely pinched with hunger. So far as appears, Williams entered the desert without a weapon, bow or arrow, spear or club, hatchet or gun, to hunt for bird or beast, and every esculent root was frozen in the ground and buried in the snow. That winter was signally bitter and he felt its keen severity. It seems to have haunted his mind in 1652, when he dedicated his 'Hireling Ministry' to Charles II., in the epistle to which, he calls New England a 'miserable, cold, howl

ing wilderness.' Without bread or bed for fourteen weeks, and the first white man who had ever wandered in those mazes, he regarded himself cared for of God as miraculously as was Elijah, and he sang this song in his desolate pilgrimage:

'God's Providence is rich to his,

Let some distrustful be;
In wilderness in great distress,

These ravens have fed me!'

The bronzed barbarians through whose lands he passed were superstitious, ferocious and often treacherous. He would not have been safe for an hour, had not his kind acts toward them been noised through their tribes. While at Plymouth he had gone forth amongst them, had visited their wigwams, learned their language and preached to them the good news of the kingdom; and now his love governed the

THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE.

643

wild element in their bosoms when he had no power over fierce winter storms. He knew their chiefs or sachems, and on reaching their settlements on Narraganset Bay, his sufferings touched the savage heart. They remembered his former kindness, welcomed him to Indian hospitality, and Massasoit took him to his cabin as he would a brother. Here he bought a tract of land, pitched his tent, and with the opening spring began to plant and build on the east bank of the Seekonk River. Immediately, however, he received a friendly letter from Winslow, Governor of Plymouth, advising him to cross the river and push farther into the wilderness, as he was too near the boundary line of that colony. Seeking and pursuing peace, he and his companions took a canoe, shot into the stream and made their way down to a little cove near India Point, when a company of Indians hailed them with a friendly salutation which they had caught from the English: What cheer?' There they tarried for a time, but kept on round the Point to the mouth of the Moshassuck River, where a delicious spring of water invited them to land. Casting around for a resting-place in the dense forest, where wild beasts and savages hemmed them in from their Christian brethren, and where they were far enough from persecuting Christians to give Christianity fair play, they stood on holy ground. Under a bright June sky, with a soil around them which was unpolluted by the foot of oppression and a virgin fountain laughing at their feet, for the first time in life their bosoms swelled full free to worship God. There he said of his harsh brethren: 'I had the country before me, and might be as free as themselves, and we should be loving neighbors together.' He built an altar there, and called the name of that place Providence; for he said, 'God has been merciful to me in my distress!'

a shelter to persons distressed

There he bought land of the Indians for the Providence plantations, and in June, 1636, laid the foundation-stone of the freest city and State on earth; a republic of true liberty, a perpetual memorial to the unseen Finger that pointed out the hallowed spot. To this day that virgin stream remains unmingled with a tear drawn from the eye by Christian cruelty, nor has religious despotism yet forced a drop of blood there from the veins of God's elect. The first concern of its illustrious founder was, that this new home should be for conscience." The compact drawn reads thus: We whose names are here underwritten, being desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to submit ourselves in active and passive obedience, to all such orders or agencies as shall be made for public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together into a township, and such others whom they shall admit into the same, only in civil things.' Here we find the first germ of that great modern doctrine which he afterward avowed in his Bloody Tenet' in these words: The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.' Also, this simple compact sweeps away at a stroke every allegation that he was banished for civil wrongs, and that the religious aspects of his case were an after-thought. Those who make that

2

644

TESTIMONY OF BANCROFT.

allegation are bound by self-respect as well as historic justice to show on what line of human motive Williams, exiled for faction and sedition, should, in organizing a new government, first exact the bond that no man under that government should ever be 'molested for his conscience.' How do the antecedents of such alleged civil crime express themselves in such a sequence? No; here, as elsewhere, human nature was true to itself. That which had been cruelly denied in Massachusetts and for which he had suffered the loss of all things, should now be secured at all hazard. Each man reserved to himself the rights of conscience, which no number of the 'major' part might touch, and that at once was made an inalienable right; all else in civil things' could be risked as of minor consequence.

We have already seen that from the Swiss Baptists of 1527, the Dutch Baptists, the Confessions of 1611 and others, this doctrine had gone forth to do its work and had been a cardinal principle with all Baptists. Also, that William of Orange was the first of rulers in the old governments who embodied it in an existing constitution; but the honor was reserved for Roger Williams of making it the foundation-stone on which human government should stand; because conscience is the regnant power to which all obligation appeals in the individual man. This demanded from Bancroft, our great historian, that memorable utterance which has been sneered at as 'rhetoric,' by men who are unworthy to untie the latchet of his shoe, although as an honest chronicler he could not withhold this testimony concerning Roger Williams :

'He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law. . . . Williams would permit persecution of no opinion, no religion, leaving heresy unharmed by law, and orthodoxy unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes. . . 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 of society, than that which establishes a perpetual religious peace, and spreads tranquillity through every community and every bosom. If Copernicus is held in perpetual reverence, because, on his death-bed, he published to the world that the sun is the center of our system; if the name of Kepler is preserved in the annals of human excellence for his sagacity in detecting the laws of the 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.'3

In 1872 the Congress of the United States had placed a memorial of Roger Williams in the National Capitol, and Senator Anthony, January 9, delivered a eulogy of great justice and beauty, in which he paid the following tribute to the immortal defender of soul liberty:

'In all our history no name shines with a purer light than his whose memorial we have lately placed in the Capitol. In the history of all the world there is no