Complete. From “Curiosities of American Literature.”

ROGER WILLIAMS was on many accounts the most remarkable man among the Puritans. He was the first legislator who fully recognized the rights of conscience, and this of itself should make his name immortal. He was eccentric in conduct as well as in opinion, but, nevertheless, a man of genius and virtue, of firmness, courage, disinterestedness, and benevolence. The notice of Williams and his writings by Dr. Verplanck is so just and comprehensive that we quote it without abridgment. He emigrated to New England from Wales in 1630. He was then, says Verplanck, a man of austere life and popular manners, full of reading, skilled in controversy, and gifted with a rapid, copious, and vehement eloquence. The writers of those days represent him as being full of turbulent and singular opinions, “and the whole country,” saith the quaint Cotton Mather, “was soon like to be set on fire by the rapid motion of a windmill in the head of this one man.” The heresy which appeared most grievous to his brethren was his zeal for unqualified religious liberty. In the warmth of his charity, he contended for “freedom of conscience, even to Papists and Arminians, with security of civil peace to all,” a doctrine that filled the Massachusetts clergy with horror and alarm. “He violently urged,” says Cotton Mather, “that the civil magistrate might not punish breaches of the first table of commandments, which utterly took away from the authority all capacity to prevent the land which they had purchased on purpose for a recess from such things from becoming such a sink of abomination as would have been the reproach and ruin of Christianity in these parts of the world.”

  In addition to these “most disturbant and offensive doctrines,” Mather charges him with preaching against the Royal Charter of the colony, “on an insignificant pretense of wrong therein done unto the Indians.” To his fervent zeal for liberty and opinion, this singular man united an equal degree of tenacity to every article of his own narrow creed. He objected to the custom of returning thanks after meat, as, in some manner or other, involving a corruption of primitive and pure worship; he refused to join any of the churches in Boston, unless they would first make a public and solemn declaration of their repentance for having formerly communed with the Church of England; and when his doctrines of religious liberty were condemned by the clergy, he wrote to his own church at Salem “that if they would not separate as well from the churches of New England as of Old, he would separate from them.”

  All his peculiar opinions, whether true or erroneous, were alike offensive to his Puritan brethren, and controversy soon waxed warm. Some logicians, more tolerant or politic than the rest, attempted to reconcile the disputants by a whimsical, and not very intelligible, sophism. They approved not, said they, of persecuting men for conscience’ sake, but solely for correcting them for sinning against conscience; and so not persecuting, but punishing heretics. Williams was not a man who could be imposed upon by words, or intimidated by threats; and he accordingly persevered in inculcating his doctrines publicly and vehemently. The clergy, after having in vain endeavored to shake him by argument and remonstrance, at last determined to call in the aid of the civil authority; and the general court, after due consideration of the case, passed sentence of banishment upon him, or, as they phrased it, “ordered his removal out of the jurisdiction of the court.” Some of the men in power had determined that he should be sent to England; but when they sent to take him, they found that, with his usual spirit of resolute independence, he had already departed, no one knew whither, accompanied by a few of his people, who, to use their own language, had gone with their beloved pastor “to seek their providences.” After some wanderings, he pitched his tent at a place to which he gave the name of Providence, and there became the founder and legislator of the colony of Rhode Island. There he continued to rule, sometimes as the governor, and always as the guide and father of the settlement, for forty-eight years, employing himself in acts of kindness to his former enemies, affording relief to the distressed, and offering an asylum to the persecuted. The government of his colony was formed on his favorite principle, that in matters of faith and worship every citizen should walk according to the light of his own conscience, without restraint or interference from the civil magistrate. During a visit which Williams made to England, in 1643, he published a formal and labored vindication of this doctrine, under the title of “The Bloody Tenet; or, a Dialogue between Truth and Peace.” In this work, written with his usual boldness and decision, he anticipated most of the arguments which, fifty years after, attracted so much attention when they were brought forward by Locke. His own conduct in power was in perfect accordance with his speculative opinions; and when, in his old age, the order of his little community was disturbed by an irruption of Quaker preachers, he combated them only in pamphlets and public disputations, and contented himself with overwhelming their doctrines with a torrent of learning, sarcasms, syllogisms, and puns.

  It should also be remembered, to the honor of Roger Williams, that no one of the early colonists, without excepting William Penn himself, equaled him in justice and benevolence towards the Indians. He labored incessantly, and with much success, to enlighten and conciliate them, and by this means acquired a personal influence among them, which he had frequently the enviable satisfaction of exerting in behalf of those who had banished him. It is not the least remarkable or characteristic incident of his varied life, that within one year after his exile, and while he was yet hot with controversy and indignant at his wrongs, his first interference with the affairs of his former colony was to protect its frontier settlements from an Indian massacre. From that time forward, though he was never permitted to return to Massachusetts, he was frequently employed by the government of that province in negotiations with the Indians, and on other business of the highest importance. Even Cotton Mather, in spite of his steadfast abhorrence of Williams’s heresy, seems to have been touched with the magnanimity and kindness of the man; and after having stigmatized him as “the infamous Korah of New England,” he confesses a little reluctantly that “for the forty years after his exile he acquitted himself so laudably that many judicious people judged him to have had the root of the matter in him during the long winter of his retirement.”