A famous clergyman, minister at Salem, Massachusetts, but banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635 on account of his views upon religious liberty. In 1636 he founded the city of Providence, and was the chief citizen of the Rhode Island colony until his death. He was the first upholder of the doctrine of liberty of conscience in its entirety, and actively sustained his theories in many controversial works. “Key Into the Languages of America;” “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience;” “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavour to wash it white in the Bloud of the Lambe;” “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered;” “George Fox Digg’d Out of his Burrowes,” include his principal works.

Personal

  His history belongs to America rather than England; but we must not even thus casually mention his name, without an expression of respect and reverence, for he was one of the best men who ever set foot upon the new world—a man of genius and of virtue, in whom enthusiasm took the happiest direction, and produced the best fruits…. If ever a Welsh Fuller should write the Worthies of Wales, Roger Williams will deserve, if not the first place, a place among the first, for he began the first civil government upon earth that gave equal liberty of conscience.

  Roger Williams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty…. It became his glory to found a State upon that principle, and to stamp himself upon its rising institutions, in characters so deep that the impress has remained to the present day, and can never be erased without the total destruction of the work…. He was the first person in modern Christendom to establish civil government on the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law; and in its defence he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor.

  We must not rehearse in detail the sequel of the story;—how, instead of a strict enforcement of the sentence, he was permitted in consideration of his health to remain in Salem through the winter, under an injunction “not to go about to draw others to his opinions;”—how, as soon as he was well enough, he renewed his work of agitation;—how the court of magistrates, finding their authority defied and their clemency (or what they thought was clemency) abused, attempted to put him on shipboard, that he might try what liberty there was for such agitation in England; how he escaped out of their hands, and went beyond their jurisdiction into the land of Narragansett, where he builded a city and devoutly named it Providence; how, notwithstanding the contempt with which Puritan statesmen in the other colonies regarded his experiment in the science of government, or as they thought no-government, the relations between him and them were always friendly;—how he grew wiser and gentler, though hardly less crotchetty, as he grew older;—how he kept company with the wild men of the woods, winning their confidence and love;—how his old age was honored;—how he died and was buried, leaving a name not unworthy of grateful and perpetual remembrance wherever there is perfect liberty for men to think, to speak their thoughts, and to worship in spirit and in truth.

  Rodger Williams, never in anything addicted to concealments, has put himself without reserve into his writings. There he still remains. There if anywhere we may get well acquainted with him. Searching for him along the two thousand printed pages upon which he has stamped his own portrait, we seem to see a very human and fallible man, with a large head, a warm heart, a healthy body, an eloquent and imprudent tongue; not a symmetrical person, poised, cool, accurate, circumspect; a man very anxious to be genuine and to get at the truth, but impatient of slow methods, trusting gallantly to his own institutions, easily deluded by his own hopes; an imaginative, sympathetic, affluent, impulsive man; an optimist; his master-passion benevolence; his mind clarifying itself slowly; never quite settled on all subjects in the universe; at almost every moment on the watch for some new idea about that time expected to heave in sight; never able by the ordinary means of intellectual stagnation to win for himself in his life-time the bastard glory of doctrinal consistency; professing many things by turn and nothing long, until at last, even in mid-life, he reached the moral altitude of being able to call himself only a Seeker—in which not ignoble creed he continued for the remainder of his days on earth. It must be confessed that there is even yet in the fame of Rodger Williams a singular vitality. While living in this world, it was his fate to be much talked about, as well as to disturb much the serenity of many excellent people; and the rumour of him still agitates and divides men. There are, in fact, some signs that his fame is now about to take out a new lease, and to build for itself a larger habitation. At any rate, the world, having at last nearly caught up with him, seems ready to vote—though with a peculiarly respectable minority in opposition—that Rodger Williams was after all a great man, one of the true heroes, seers, world-movers, of these latter ages.

General

  His industry in every enterprise which he undertook was indefatigable…. He placed the highest estimate upon the value of time. “One grain of its inestimable sand,” says he, “is worth a golden mountain.”… His knowledge, especially in history and theology, appears to have been extensive, and his scholarship in the classic languages unusually varied and exact. As a writer, he had little time, and, it may be, little taste for the elegances of language.

  The “Bloody Tenent” is a noble work, full of brave heart and tenderness; a book of learning and piety—the composition of a true, gentle nature.

  Of his mental powers we have no means of judging, except the respect and interest he awakened in those with whom he dwelt, and the writings he left. These are chiefly of a controversial nature, and on questions which have, in a great measure, lost their significance. The style, too, is involved, quaint, and often pedantic. The views, however, advocated even in his polemic discussions, are often in advance of his time, and the sentiments he professes are noble and progressive. Thus, “The Bloody Tenent” is an earnest plea with the clergy for toleration; and “A Hireling Ministry” presents bold and just arguments in support of free churches, and against an arbitrary system of tithes. In the Redwood Library, at Newport, is a copy of “George Fox digged out of his Burrows,” a characteristic specimen of the theological hardihood of Williams, as exhibited in his controversy with the Quakers. But it is from his original force of character, and his loyalty to a great principle, that Roger Williams derives his claim to our admiration. His shades of opinion are comparatively unimportant; but the spirit in which he worked, suffered, and triumphed, enrols his name among the moral heroes and benefactors of the world.

  Williams was an able, earnest, and successful pioneer in that great movement towards religious freedom which has characterized the history of the United States. But in justice to the Puritans it should be said that he was sometimes hasty, indiscreet, sensational; and that he lacked the self-control which should be shown by a great reformer, as well as the solid learning of the Puritan leaders.

  Milton spoke of Williams as an extraordinary man and a noble confessor of religious liberty, who sought and found a safe refuge for the sacred ark of conscience. His associates in the new world described him in terms less exalted. Bradford calls him a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment. Cotton Mather spoke of his having a windmill in his head; Sir William Martin and Hubbard both praised his zeal, but thought it overheated. Southey held his memory in “veneration,” which seems hardly the word to apply to a man so profoundly contentious as Williams was. Lowell is substantially just to him when he writes, “He does not show himself a strong or a very wise man,” though “charity and tolerance flow so noticeably from his pen that it is plain they were in his heart.” Williams’s place as a religious leader has perhaps been exaggerated by his eulogists. His views were not in advance of those of many of his contemporaries, his cardinal doctrine that “there is no other prudent Christian way of preserving peace in the world but by permission of different consciences” being scarcely more than a reaffirmation of John Smith’s dictum of 1611 to the effect that Christ being the lawgiver of the conscience, the magistrates were not entitled to meddle with religious opinions. His mind had none of the roominess of Fuller’s, or of the elevation of Milton’s; but he certainly had a firm grip of the necessity of a principle of toleration, and he was one of the very first to make a serious effort to put that principle into practice.