Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of the Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with a glowing
mysticism: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among
the lilies.... I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.” But when he
went out into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world as a land where the lover might dwell
with his bride. Yet upon his arrival there he found the churches still
“implicitly National,” and “yet asleep in respect of abundant ignorance
and negligence, and consequently grosse abominations and pollutions of
Worship, in which the choicest servants of God, and most faithfull
Witnesses of many truths have lived in more or lesse, yea in maine and
fundamental points, ever since the Apostasie.” Which “abominations and
pollutions of Worship,” he now proposed to sweep away altogether.[51]
It was not an easy program, nor one entered upon lightly. Better
than most, Roger Williams understood how closely interwoven were the
threads of church and state. Separatism, with its necessary corollary
of toleration, could not be unraveled from Carolinian society without
loosening the whole social fabric. It was a political question even
more than ecclesiastical; and it could justify itself only in the
light of a total political philosophy. No other man in New England
comprehended so fully the difficulties involved in the problem, as
Roger Williams, or examined them so thoroughly; and out of his long
speculations emerged a theory of the commonwealth that must be reckoned
the richest contribution of Puritanism to American political thought.
The just renown of Roger Williams has too long been obscured by
ecclesiastical historians, who in emphasizing his defense of the
principle of toleration have overlooked the fact that religious
toleration was only a necessary deduction from the major principles
of his political theory, and that he was concerned with matters far
more fundamental than the negative virtue of non-interference in the
domain of individual faith. He was primarily a political philosopher
rather than a theologian--one of the acutest and most searching of
his generation of Englishmen, the teacher of Vane and Cromwell and
Milton, a forerunner of Locke and the natural-rights school, one of the
notable democratic thinkers that the English race has produced. Much
of his life was devoted to the problem of discovering a new basis for
social reorganization, and his intellectual progress was marked by an
abundant wreckage of obsolete theory and hoary fiction that strewed
his path. He was a social innovator on principle, and he left no system
unchallenged; each must justify itself in reason and expediency or be
put aside. Broadly the development of his thought falls into three
stages: the substitution of the compact theory of the state for the
divine-right theory; the rejection of the suppositious compact of the
earlier school and the fictitious abstract state--still postulated by
many thinkers--and the substitution of a realistic conception of the
political state as the sovereign repository of the social will, and
the government--or agent of the state--as the practical instrument of
society to effect its desired ends; and finally, the difficult problem
of creating the necessary machinery of a democratic commonwealth, as
the exigencies of the Rhode Island experiment required. Throughout, the
inspiration of his thinking was social rather than narrowly political
or theological, and the creative source would seem to have been the
middle ages with their fruitful principle of men in a given society
enrolling themselves voluntarily as members of bodies corporate,
finding in such corporate ties a sufficient and all-embracing social
bond.[52]
In his substitution of the compact theory for divine right, Williams
was brought face to face with the fundamental assumption of the
Massachusetts theocracy, based on numerous passages of Scripture,
that the political state is established and sanctioned by the God
of the Hebrews--an assumption that was freely used to justify the
engrossing of authority by the magistracy. As a theologian he
critically examined the Scriptural authorities, and while conceding
the divine source of government in general, he was careful to cut
away all autocratic deductions from the Pauline assertion that “the
powers that be are ordained of God.” “Government and order in families,
towns, etc., is an ordinance of the Most High, Rom. 13, for the peace
and good of mankind”[53] he admitted; but he agreed with Richard
Hooker in discovering this order of government to be no other than
natural law. The state is divine in origin because it is natural,
and what is natural is of God. The Hebraic commonwealth had been
established immediately in an ordinance of Jehovah, but Christ and
his disciples regarded the state and God as distinct authorities,
not to be confused--“Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The conclusion
at which he arrived, then, from the merging of divine ordinances and
natural law, was expressed in a doctrine that sets apart the individual
citizen in all his spiritual and intellectual rights, from the subject
of the commonwealth, and provides the basis for his principle of
toleration. “A Civill Government is an ordinance of God, to conserve
the Civill peace of the people, so farre as concerns their Bodies and
Goods,” and no farther.[54] From this position he never retreated.
Every lawful Magistrate whether succeeding or elective, is not only
the Minister of God, but the Minister or servant of the people
also (what people or nation soever they be all the world over),
and that Minister or Magistrate goes beyond his commission who
intermeddles with that which cannot be given him in commission from
the people....[55]
Having thus reduced the divine-right field within narrow limits and
translated it into an abstraction, he preëmpts all the ground of
practical politics for his compact theory. In accord with a long line
of liberal thinkers running back through Richard Hooker to Augustine
and the earlier Roman school, he accepted the major deductions from the
compact theory of the state: that government is a man-made institution,
that it rests on consent, and that it is founded on the assumed
equality of the subjects. He had only to translate these abstractions
into concrete terms, and apply them realistically, to create a new and
vital theory. The covenant idea of church organization had long been
familiar to Separatists. To this the Pilgrims had added the Mayflower
compact and Thomas Hooker had drawn up the Connecticut compact.
Government resting on consent and authorized by written agreement was
then no untried novelty when Roger Williams began his long speculations
on the nature and functions of the political state. With Hobbes he
traced the origin of the state to social necessity. The condition of
nature is a condition of anarchy--a war of all against all; and for
mutual protection the state takes its rise. “The World otherwise would
be like a sea, wherein Men, like Fishes, would hunt and devoure each
other, and the greater devour the lesse.”[56] But unlike the fiction
assumed by Hobbes and Locke, this was no suppositious contract between
ruler and ruled in prehistoric times, but present and actual, entered
into between the several members of a free community for their common
governance; nor on the other hand, like Burke’s irrevocable compact,
was it an unyielding constitution or fundamental law; but flexible,
responsive to changing conditions, continually modified to meet present
needs. It is no other than a mutual agreement, arrived at frankly by
discussion and compromise, to live together in a political union,
organizing the life of the commonwealth in accordance with nature,
reason, justice, and expediency.
From this conception of the flexible nature of compact law came the
sharp delimitation between state and government that he was at pains
to make clear, and that constitutes a significant phase of his theory.
Having rejected in his thinking the fictitious abstract state, the
repository of an equally fictitious abstract sovereignty, he located
sovereignty in the total body of citizens embraced within the community
consciousness, acting in a political capacity. The state is society
organized, government is the state functioning--it is the political
machinery devised by the sovereign people to effect definite ends. And
since the single end and purpose for which the body of citizens erect
the state is the furtherance of the communal well-being, the government
becomes a convenient instrument to serve the common weal, responsible
to the sovereign people and strictly limited by the terms of the social
agreement. “The Sovereign power of all civill Authority,” he asserted,
“is founded in the consent of the People that every Commonwealth hath
radically and fundamentally. The very Common-weales, Bodies of People
... have fundamentally in themselves the Root of Power, to set up what
Government and Governors they shall agree upon.”[57] Since governments
are but “Derivatives and Agents immediately derived and employed as
eyes and hands and instruments,” the state or sovereign people can
make their “own severall Lawes and Agreements ... according to their
severall Natures, Dispositions and Constitutions, and their Common
peace and wellfare.”[58] Final appeal is to “the Bar of the People or
Commonweal, where all may personally meet, as in some Commonweales of
small number, or in greater by their Representatives”--a system that
suits with the “Nature, Conditions and circumstances of the People,”
according to the “Circumstances of time and place.”[59] In a well-known
passage he puts the matter more compactly, thus:
From this _Grant_ I infer ... that the _Soveraigne, originall_, and
_foundation of civill power_ lies in the _People_.... And if so,
that a People may erect and establish what _forme_ of _Government_
seemes to them most meete for their _civill condition_: It is
evident that such _Governments_ as are by them erected and
established, have no more _power_, nor for no longer time, then the
_civill power_ or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them
with. This is cleere not only in _Reason_, but in the experience
of all _commonweales_, where the people are not deprived of their
naturall freedom by the power of Tyrants.[60]
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience and
reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure of
freedom and well-being. It is armed with a potential power of coercion,
but only to secure justice. In such a state government can subsist only
by making proselytes to sound reason, by compromise and arbitration,
and not by force. But if sovereignty inheres in the majority will, what
securities remain for individual and minority rights? What fields lie
apart from the inquisition of the majority, and by what agencies shall
the engrossing of power be thwarted? The replies to such questions, so
fundamental to every democratic program, he discovers in a variety of
principles; to the former in an adaptation of the spirit of medieval
society that restricted political functions by social usage, and to the
latter by the application of local home rule, the initiative and the
referendum, and the recall. In the large field he ascribes to social