The Beginners of a Nation Part 30

[Sidenote: Williams dealt with ecclesiastically.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governors.h.i.+p by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher"

of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, ent.i.tled as such to be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's "violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.

[Sidenote: The governor's verse.]

It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly against the Salem heretic was thus foiled by Cotton's prudent and intricate orderliness in procedure that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is happily the only example of his verse that has survived:

[Sidenote: Eliot's New England Biography, 156, 157.]

Let men of G.o.d in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a c.o.c.katrice To poison all with heresy and vice.

If men be left and otherwise combine, My epitaph's I die no libertine.

XII.

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

The most substantial grievance of the rulers against Williams was his opposition to "the oath." In order to make sure of the loyalty of the residents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity to be taken by residents had been promulgated. Practical men are wont to put aside minor scruples in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew-bread when he is famis.h.i.+ng: but Williams would rather starve than mumble a crumb of it. He did not believe in enforced oaths; they obliged the wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded the soul's freedom.

Cotton says that Williams's scruples excited such an opposition to the oath that the magistrates were not able to enforce it. He thus unwittingly throws a strong light on the weakness of the age, and extenuates the conduct of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The age was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this side was the product of his time. In such an age a scruple-maker of ability and originality like Williams might be a source of danger.

[Sidenote: Scruples small and great.]

During the year following Williams was several times "convented"

before the Court. He was charged with having broken his promise not to speak about the patent, with opposing the residents' oath, with maintaining certain scruples in opposition to the customs of the times, as that a man should not return thanks after a meal, or call on an unregenerate child to give thanks for his food. These were not more trivial certainly than half a hundred scruples then prevalent, but they chanced to be unfas.h.i.+onable--a d.a.m.ning fault in a scruple.

The sense of proportion was feeble in religionists of that day, and neither Williams nor his opponents understood the comparative magnitude of his greater contentions, and the triviality of those petty scruples about which, like the whole Puritan world, he was very busy. Religious freedom and the obligation of grace after meat could then be put into the same category. As years went by, although the mind of Williams was never disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to see clearly what was the real battle of his life. No better fortune can befall a great spirit than such a clarification of vision. The extended works of Williams's later life are written mainly to overthrow the "b.l.o.o.d.y tenent of persecution." It was this champions.h.i.+p of soul liberty as the weightiest matter of the law that lifted him above all others who paid t.i.thes of their little garden herbs.

[Sidenote: Williams inflexible.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 81.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Rec., i, 135, 136.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Rec., i, 156, 157. Winthrop's Journal, i, 194.]

Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of the Roman churches. Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle, advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced.

Stoughton, who had denied that the "a.s.sistants" of a corporation were scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he retracted. Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last.

The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leaders.h.i.+p, protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem. He was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the "rockie strength" of his opinions in spite of penalties and majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the commonwealth.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Williams's trial.]

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, incorrigible offender.

Eliot, Stoughton, and Endecott, and even Williams's fellow-elder, Sharpe, and the whole church at Salem, might be argued into conformity by the sharp dialectics of the clergy, or bullied out of their convictions by the sharper logic of the magistrates, but Roger Williams could not be overborne. Individualist in his very nature, his self-reliant spirit was able to face isolation or excommunication.

The great Hooker was set to dispute with him. Hooker's refined arguments were drawn out by inferences linked to inferences. He proved to the satisfaction of everybody but the culprit that it was not lawful for Williams, with his opinions, to set food before his unregenerate child, since he did not allow an irreligious child to go through the form of giving thanks. But the wire-drawn logic of Hooker, though Williams could not always answer it, had no more influence with him than the ingenious sophistications of the pious Cotton; Williams constantly fell back upon the "rockie strength" of his principles. On the 9th of October, 1635, he was sentenced to banishment. After the manner of that curious age, his banishment was based on charges of great importance mixed with charges utterly trivial. His denial of the authority of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of the churches and the belief of individuals is, however, made one of the cardinal offenses in all the trustworthy accounts given at the time. With this were joined in the proceedings, but not in the sentence, such things as the denial of the propriety of grace after meat. All the elders but one advised his banishment.

[Sidenote: Williams banished.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

[Sidenote: Note 14.]

[Sidenote: Note 15.]

[Sidenote: Note 16.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 209, 210.]

The magistrates, though deeply "incensed" against him, probably felt at the last some reluctance to banish such a man. Six weeks were accorded him in which to leave. Winthrop, who was Williams's friend, and who seems to have been loath to consent to his banishment, wrote to him to "steer his course for Narragansett Bay," where there was territory beyond the bounds of Ma.s.sachusetts and Plymouth. The forest journeys or boat voyages to Boston and back, the bitter controversies there, and the uproar of indignation which was produced in Salem by the news of the verdict, the desertion of Williams by Endecott, convinced by force, and by Sharpe, the ruling elder, who had been also dealt with, the natural yielding of the Salem church after a while to the pressure from the General Court, and to the desire of the townsmen to secure the lands at Marble Neck, put a strain on Williams which, added to his necessary toil in the field, broke his health and he fell ill. The General Court probably also felt the recoil of its act. When six weeks had expired consent was given that Williams should remain during the winter provided he would refrain from preaching. But Williams was in Salem, and in Salem he was the center of interest--just now he was the center of explosion. It was impossible for the great Separatist to be silent. A few faithful friends, come-outers like himself, clave to him and repudiated as he did communion with the church at Salem, which could condone the offenses of the magistrates for the sake of "these children's toys of land, meadows, cattle, and government." These fellow-Separatists, some of whom perhaps had removed from Plymouth out of love for this unworldly saint, loved him none the less for his courage and his sorrows. They frequented his house on Sunday as he convalesced. Indeed, the attachment to him was so great that the "ordinances" which had been appointed by the magistrates and enforced on Salem as the price of the common land on Marble Neck, were neglected and almost deserted.

Williams could not refrain from speech with this concourse of visitors, and at length word came to Boston that more than twenty persons had definitely adhered to the opinions of their former teacher, unconvinced by the argument of the rod of justice applied to Endecott and Sharpe, or by the valuable land on Marble Neck. These disciples proposed to remove in the spring with Williams to the sh.o.r.es of Narragansett Bay. This might meet the approval of the sagacious and kindly Winthrop, who had directed Williams's attention to that promising place, and who foresaw perhaps the usefulness of such a man in the dangerous Indian crisis now threatening the colony. But to devotees of uniformity, the prospect of a community on the very border of the land of the saints tolerating all sorts of opinionists was insufferable. When once the civil government weights itself with spiritual considerations, its whole equilibrium is disturbed. Liberty and justice seem insignificant by the side of the immensities. The magistrates, or a part of them, were alarmed at the prospect of a settlement of the followers of Williams at Narragansett Bay, "whence the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people being, many of them, much taken with an apprehension of his G.o.dliness." It was therefore agreed to send him to England on a s.h.i.+p soon to sail.

XIV.

[Sidenote: Escape to the Indians.]

The hards.h.i.+ps of such a voyage in midwinter in his state of health might prove fatal, and his arrival in England would almost certainly deliver him into the hands of Laud. But what is justice or mercy when the welfare of churches and the rescue of imperiled souls is to be considered? A warrant was dispatched ordering him to Boston within a certain time. Probably knowing what was in store for him, he protested that it would be dangerous for him, in view of his health, to make the journey, and some of the Salem people went to Boston in his behalf, and, as was natural in the circ.u.mstances, made exaggerated representations regarding his physical condition. But the magistrates had other information. They sent the valiant and notorious Captain Underhill, in whom were mingled about equally devoutness, military courage, and incorrigible lewdness, to bring Williams by sea in a shallop. Williams was probably informed of their purpose, for, while Underhill in his little craft was beating up to Salem in wintry seas on an errand so congenial, expecting perhaps to come upon his quarry unawares, Williams was fleeing from one hamlet of bark wigwams to another. Here among the barbarians he was sure of faithful friends and secure concealment. Underhill found on his arrival that the culprit had disappeared three days before he got there, and n.o.body in Salem, that could, would tell whither the fugitive had gone.

[Sidenote: Williams founds Providence.]

Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure of speech, "steering his course" "in winter snow" toward Narragansett Bay. "I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," he says, in his vivid and hyperbolic fas.h.i.+on of speech, "not knowing what bed or bread did mean." He began one settlement on the eastern bank of the Seekonk River after getting land from the Indians, but his old enemies the royal patents now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of Plymouth, a kind-hearted, politic man, the one born diplomatist of New England, warned him that he was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked him to remove to the other side of the water, because they "were loath to displease the Bay." It was not enough to drive a heretic from the bounds of Ma.s.sachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the time would have expelled him from the continent had its arm been long enough.

Williams had already begun to build and to plant, but he removed once more to the place which he named Providence. He planted the germinal settlement of the first state in the world that founded religious liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to the law no cognizance whatever of religious beliefs or conduct where the "civil peace" was not endangered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The early settlements on Narragansett Bay.]

XV.

[Sidenote: Williams's banishment an act of persecution.]

[Sidenote: Note 17.]

Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have done what they could to obscure the facts of the trial and banishment of Williams. It has been argued by more than one writer that it was not a case of religious persecution at all, but the exclusion of a man dangerous to the state.

Cotton, with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that Williams was "enlarged" rather than banished. The case has even been pettifogged in our own time by the a.s.sertion that the banishment was only the action of a commercial company excluding an uncongenial person from its territory. But with what swift indignation would the Ma.s.sachusetts rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes have repudiated a plea which denied their magistracy! They put so strong a pressure on Stoughton, who said that the a.s.sistants were not magistrates, that he made haste to renounce his pride of authors.h.i.+p and to deliver his booklet to be officially burned, nor did even this prevent his punishment. The rulers of "the Bay" were generally frank advocates of religious intolerance; they regarded toleration as a door set open for the devil to enter. Not only did they punish for unorthodox expressions; they even a.s.sumed to inquire into private beliefs. Williams was only one of scores bidden to depart on account of opinion.

[Sidenote: Intolerance as a virtue.]

[Sidenote: Note 18.]

[Sidenote: Note 19.]

[Sidenote: Simple Cobbler of Agawam, pp. 3 and 6.]