All Christian governments of the seventeenth century held that the union of Church and State was necessary for the safety of the State and the preservation of the Church. For a thousand years this doctrine had been intrenching itself in Christendom, until it was practically unquestioned by the powers that were. Augustine, Charlemagne, Luther, Calvin, believed it and acted on it. Freedom of conscience for the individual was

not asserted at the Reformation. Cujus regio, ejus religio," was the decision embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The English Reformation was political rather than religious, and demanded that the English sovereign should be both independent of the papal see and absolute head of the English Church. Luther recoiled from the excesses of Münster, and dared not intrust religion to freedom of conscience. The result of the Reformation was many national churches in place of one universal church, not liberty in place of authority. If religion was essential to the weal of the people, then the State could not neglect it. The theocracy which Calvin established at Geneva was cruelly logical and logically cruel. The first Helvetic Confession declares, "The chief office of the magistrate is to defend religion and to take care that the word of God be purely preached." The Westminster Assembly affirmed,

V

"The civil magistrate hath authority and it is his duty to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed." If now the nations of the Old World, strong and well established, clung to these ideas, how tenacious and how frantic must have been the attachment to them on the part of the New England colony, conscious of its weakness, menaced by tyrants on the one side and fanatics on the other! It had been instructed by all Christian governments of the Old World, and it bettered their instructions. In the very year of Roger Williams's arrival the General Court of Massachusetts passed this resolution: "It is ordered that henceforth no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this commonwealth but such as are members of the churches within the limits of this jurisdiction." No voters except church members, and no church members except on approval of the clergy, such was the compact, homogeneous, and militant organization now preparing to resist the newest thought of the age. By as much as New England was weaker than Old England, by so much more did it resolve on the policy

Robert

of exclusion of dangerous opinions.
Baillie, a zealous defender of the Presbyterian
faith in Scotland, wrote in 1643, "They in New
England are much more strict and rigid than we
or any church to suppress by the power of the
magistrate all who are not of their way."

On this
Conceiv-

What now was the doctrine of "soul-liberty " brought by the young minister into the rigid and rigorous ecclesiasticism of Massachusetts? It was far more than a doctrine of toleration. point confusion of thought still exists. ably, we may occupy any one of three positions -7 regarding the relations of the civil and the religious authority. We may affirm the duty of the government to support and control the institutions of religion; we may affirm as a concession to human weakness the expediency of tolerating false views of religion; or we may affirm the absolute wrong of any interference by the government in matters of religious faith. It was not the second of these positions -the duty of tolerating false opinions -on which Roger Williams planted his feet. It was the third and distinctly! different position, that the government may not decide what is true and what is false in religion, may neither encourage nor repress religious doctrine, that it must refrain both from tolerance and intolerance, and, confining itself to the civil realm

entirely, leave the consciences of all men Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Atheist - absolutely free.

This is clear from his explicit writings. In his massive volumes on "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution" he declares that the "great cause of the indignation of the Most High against the state and country is . . . that all others dissenting from them, whether Jews or Gentiles, have not been allowed civil cohabitation with them, but have been distressed and persecuted by them." It is clear from his action in inserting a provision in the first charter of Providence that "otherwise than this [what is previously forbidden] all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God." The right to believe and practise one's own faith,- every man wants that. But Roger Williams wanted equal rights for the Turk and the Atheist, not because it was expedient to tolerate diversity, but because of the inherent right of every human soul to determine its own relation to its Maker.

We now see how inevitable was the struggle between the young champion of soul-liberty and the guardians of Massachusetts orthodoxy and society. Even toleration was regarded as a fatal blunder by the leaders of England and America. A noted English divine of that period wrote:

"Toleration will make the Kingdom a chaos, is a grand work of the devil, is a most transcendental, Catholic, and fundamental evil." The saintly Rutherford could say, "We regard the toleration of all religions as not far removed from blasphemy." The lines found in Governor Dudley's pocket after death express the fundamental purpose of his life,

"Let men of God in court and churches watch
O'er such as do a toleration hatch."

The first legal code for the government of Massachusetts was drawn up by the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, of Ipswich, whose wisdom found vent in the following oracle: "It is said that men ought to have liberty of their conscience, and that it is persecution to debar them of it. I can stand amazed, then reply to this: It is an astonishment to think that the brains of men should be parboiled in such impious ignorance."

Was, then, Roger Williams, like Melchisedec, "without father or mother"? Were there no other voices in the world pleading for freedom? Assuredly there were. The Brownists, or Sepa-7 ratists, of England had for some years affirmed this doctrine; and to the Anabaptists of Holland it was the cardinal truth. To the despised Anabaptists and what band of truth-bearers have