The Idea of Individualism in Politics, as Corollary to that of Freedom of Conscience in Religion, Grasped by Rhode

Island, but not by Roger

CHAPTER XI

SOUL LIBERTY IN PRACTICE - THE BAPTISTS AND

THE QUAKERS

EFORE resuming the thread of narrative

BEF

from the end of the term of Roger Williams

as President of Providence Plantations, it will be necessary to go back a little and give some further account of the seventeenth-century religious sects in New England.

These sects the Anabaptists, the Antinomians, the Baptists, and the Quakers - while differing in externals, were inwardly of close relationship. The principle for which, more than for any other, they all stood was that of opposition to legalism and formalism. They represented the claims of the spirit against the letter, of reason against tradition, of the present against the past. This fact, however, did not prevent their falling at times into extravagances. By just so much as the established order was conventional with age, by that much were the sects inclined to be unconventional from youth. We have seen, in Chapter I., how the Anabaptists of Münster, captivated by the doctrine that those inspired of God were incapable of

sin, went wild with debauchery in 1535. Yet the doctrine itself was little more than a rigidly logical deduction from the position early assumed by Luther, that the human will is purely passive in the hands of God,' and which, under the elaborating touch of John Agricola, gave rise in 1527 to the sect named by Luther himself Antinomian.

In one respect the Anabaptists in general differed markedly from the Antinomians, for, while the latter confined their dissent to matters distinctively religious, the former went so far as to refuse the taking of oaths, the acceptance of magisterial place, and the bearing of arms; and, at least in the early period, advocated a community of goods. These characteristic points (except the last) were cherished by Menno Simons upon assuming the leadership of the Anabaptists in 1537, and when the English Independent congregation of John Smyth emigrated to Amsterdam, as they did in 1606, they became in part tinctured with Mennonite ideas. Hence it is that we find certain of that branch of the English . Anabaptists called Generalists, deprecating service in the army of Cromwell. Still the majority of English Baptists — notably the Particular Baptists --were purely of home, and hence of Calvinistic, extraction, and so were not affected by Mennonite scruples respecting oaths, magistracy, and warfare. It accordingly was reserved for the Quakers, in the years 1652-54, to plant in English soil Mennonite ideas in their full perfection.

1 Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. ii., p. 412. Newman's Hist. of the Baptists in the U. S., p. 36.