050. BANISHMENT OF ROGER WILLIAMS

BANISHMENT OF ROGER WILLIAMS

Bay. But the germ of intolerance was there, though for a time it was latent. Plymouth did not have enough love for free speech to make her willing in defense of it "to displease the Bay,"—a notable difference between her and Rhode Island, for Rhode Island, only a little while after, gave up all hope of union with the other colonies rather than give up the principle of freedom.

It is very plain that Roger Williams could not find a home at Plymouth any more than at Salem. Able, conscientious, and courageous as he was, he was without question restless and contentious also. But it was not merely his restlessness and contentiousness for which he was banished, but also his advocacy of the absolute separation of Church and State; or, to use his own words, his holding that "the civil magistrate’s power extends only to the bodies and goods and outward state of men." This is the reason why he was warned off from Plymouth, after he had unwittingly taken refuge within the bounds of that colony.¹ No wonder that he could not easily forget the inhospitality that forced him to leave the corn he had planted and the house he had built, and to wander through the forests "sorely tossed for fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean." The Pilgrims as well as the Puritans thrust him out. But at last he reached a spot where both Puritans and Pilgrims ceased from troubling, and where the weary man found rest. In gratitude he called the place Providence. There he became a Baptist, and there he instituted the first government on earth organized upon the principle of absolute freedom to all belief and practice not conflicting with good order and morals. For the first time in the long and patient centuries soulliberty was recognized and guaranteed by civil government, and the unhallowed union of Church and State was formally dissolved.

All this took place in 1636. But did not Lord Baltimore secure his charter for the Maryland Colony in 1632, and did not this charter provide for complete freedom of faith? The Maryland Colony was established in 1634, two years before Roger Williams settled in Providence. Does not this give to Maryland the honor of being the first government in which liberty in matters of faith was established by law? No, it does not. Liberal as Lord Baltimore was, and eager as he was to provide an asylum where Roman Catholics might have equal privileges with members of the Church of England, it never occurred to him that a wider liberty than this was possible. Toleration extended only to such as professed to believe in Christ. There was no toleration contemplated for Socinians or infidels.⁵ The "Act concern

¹ Bancroft, History of United States, Vol. I., p. 375: Roger Williams "was the first in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law, and in its defense he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor."

² The charter gives the Proprietary the advowsons of all churches which might happen to be built, and provides that no law shall be made prejudicial to God’s holy and true religion. This cannot be held to establish the Church of England, or to prohibit the exercise of any other worship. There was probably a secret understanding that Catholics and the Church of England should enjoy the same religious rights. The charter itself did not enforce toleration, for under this charter the Church ing Religion," passed by the Maryland Assembly in 1649, was simply the writing out of Lord Baltimore’s unwritten law, and it expressed the meaning of the charter of 1632. It declares simply that "no person professing to believe in Christ shall be in any ways troubled or molested "; and that there may be no mistake it provides that blasphemy and the denial of the Trinity, or of Christ’s divinity, shall be punishable with death. Although Lord Baltimore himself was very tolerant, his charter did not enforce toleration. Under that charter, interpreted as it was by the Act of 1649,— an act for which Maryland has been too generously called "the land of the sanctuary,"—a Quaker missionary only ten years after, or in 1659,¹ received a sentence of banishment. But who ever doubted that Quakers were free to propagate their faith in Rhode Island? So Baptists first announced the principle of religious liberty in Switzerland; Baptists first advocated it in England; a Baptist first established it in America. In each case, so far as the evidence goes, it was a new discovery by men who studied the New Testament for themselves, and who sought to follow only Christ. In commenting on the Confession of English Baptists issued in 1644, Prof. Henry C. Vedder, in his "Short History of the Baptists," has well said: of England was afterward established, and disabilities were put upon Catholics and dissenters. Freedom of worship was actually granted at first, and Christians of every name were invited to settle. Puritans and Prelatists came there when persecuted in New England. Bancroft, "History of United States," Vol. I., p. 256, "The clause for liberty in Maryland extended only to Christians."

¹ This order provides that Quakers shall be arrested and whipped out of the province. This is a great landmark not only of Baptists but of the progress of enlightened Christianity. Those who published to the world this teaching, then deemed revolutionary and dangerous, held, in all but a few points of small importance, precisely those views of Christian truth that are held to-day. For substance of doctrine, any of us might subscribe to it without a moment’s hesitation. On the strength of this one fact, Baptists might fairly claim that, whatever might have been said by isolated individuals before, they were the pioneer body among modem Christian denominations to advocate the right of all men to worship God, each according to the dictates of his own conscience, without let or hindrance from any earthly power.

Again and again they have endured persecution. The unmerciful whipping of Obadiah Holmes, in the streets of Boston, and the expulsion from his office of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College, not a denominational but a State institution, for his preaching against infant baptism, were of the same piece with the fines and imprisonments with which Baptists were visited in Maine, New York, and Virginia. As Baptists began, so they continued the movement for entire abolition of church endowments and religious tests. Dexter, in his monumental work on Congregationalism, quotes from Belcher the statement that Jefferson considered Baptist church government the only form of pure democracy which then existed in the world and concluded, eight or ten years before the American Revolution, that this would be the best plan of government for the American colonies. Baptist influence in Virginia made possible the statute of religious freedom, of which Jefferson thought it an honor to be author. A Baptist committee laid its complaints before the Massachusetts delegates of the first Continental Congress. Baptists had a large share in securing the adoption of that memorable article of our national Constitution, which provides that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." And, finally, Baptists, more than any other denomination of Christians, by their persistent advocacy, brought Congress to propose, and the States to accept, just one hundred years ago, that famous first amendment to the Constitution, which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If we could now only secure the insertion in both the Federal and the State Constitutions of a provision that no public money shall ever be appropriated to sectarian institutions, the record of American Baptists would be complete.