Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
custom, he was a follower of Luther and a forerunner of French romantic
thinkers. His creative conception was an adaptation of the medieval
theory of the corporation, or group of persons voluntarily joining for
specific purposes under the law; and this idea he applies to the vexed
question of the relation of church and state. The legal status of the
church, he argued, is identical with that of a trading company; it is a
corporate body with corporate rights, and the several members enjoy all
the freedoms and privileges that inhere in them by law and nature in
their civil capacity. The character of its membership and the content
of its creed are of no different concern to the civil magistrates than
those of any other corporation. “The state religion of the world,”
he asserted, “is a Politic invention of men to maintain the civil
state.”[61] Elaborated at greater length, his thesis is this:
The _Church_ or company of _worshippers_ (whether true or false)
is like unto a ... _Corporation, Society_, or _Company_ ... in
_London_; which Companies may hold their _Courts_, keep their
_Records_, hold _disputations_; and in matters concerning their
_Societie_, may dissent, divide, breake into _Schismes_ and
_Factions_, sue and implead each other at the _Law_, yea wholly
breake up and dissolve into pieces and nothing, and yet the
_peace_ of the _Citie_ not be in the least measure impaired or
disturbed; because the _essence_ or being of the _Citie_, and so
the _well-being_ and _peace_ thereof is essentially distinct from
those particular _Societies_: the _Citie-Courts, Citie-Lawes,
Citie-punishments_ distinct from theirs. The _Citie_ was before
them, and stands absolute and intire, when such a _Corporation_ or
_Societie_ is taken down.[62]
Having thus effectively secularized the church on its institutional
side, he laid down twelve theses, of which these reach to the heart of
the matter:
(1) _God_ requireth not an _uniformity_ of _Religion_ to be
_inacted_ and _inforced_ in any _civill state_; which inforced
_uniformity_ (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of
_civill Warre, ravishing_ of _conscience, persecution_ of _Christ
Jesus_ in his servants, and of the _hypocrisie_ and destruction
of millions of souls. (2) It is the will and command of _God_,
that ... a _permission_ of the most _Paganish, Jewish, Turkish_,
or _Antichristian consciences_ and _worships_, bee granted to
_all_ men in all _Nations_ and _Countries_: and they are onely
to bee _fought_ against with that _Sword_ which is onely (in
_Soule matters_) _able_ to _conquer_, to wit, the _Sword_ of
_Gods Spirit_, the _Word_ of _God_. (3) True _civility_ and
_Christianity_ may both flourish in a _state_ or _Kingdome_,
notwithstanding the _permission_ of divers and contrary
_consciences_, either of _Jew_ or _Gentile_.[63]
Abhorrent as such doctrine was to the Massachusetts theocrats, Roger
Williams did not cease to press it home to their minds and consciences.
“I know and am persuaded,” he wrote Winthrop on July 21, 1637, “that
your misguidings are great and lamentable, and the further you pass
in your way, the further you wander, and the end of one vexation will
be but the beginning of another, till conscience be permitted (though
erroneous) to be free amongst you.”[64] It was not toleration in the
narrow sense of benevolent non-interference by an authority that
refrained from exercising its reserved right, that Roger Williams was
interested in; it was rather religious liberty as a fundamental right,
that had never been surrendered to the civil power, that lay beyond its
jurisdiction and was in no way answerable to it, that he upheld in his
great work _The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience_;
and the long dispute with John Cotton was, in its deeper significance,
a dispute between two schools of political theory and two experiments
in commonwealth building. In that notable debate aristocracy and
democracy joined issues, and the vital question of the rights and
liberties of the individual citizen in the political state for the
first time was critically examined in America.
From the foregoing analysis of his political theory it should be
clear that Roger Williams was a confirmed individualist who carried
to its logical conclusion the Reformation principle of the right of
private inquiry. Only Vane and Milton of his generation of Englishmen
went so far along that path. He had seen the liberalisms involved
in Luther’s premises submerged by the rising nationalism which
ambitious princes found useful for selfish ends; and he had seen the
policy of the Massachusetts magistrates driving boldly in the same
direction. That Rhode Island should not repeat the old unhappy mistake
of coercive absolutism, was a matter therefore of vital concern to
him. A great experiment in democracy was to be tried, and to that
experiment he devoted his life. Into the form and structure of the new
commonwealth went the best thought of English Independency. It was
founded on the principles of “liberty and equality, both in land and
government,”[65] and established in the sovereignty of the people.
That government should not engross its powers, the compact entered
into provided for frequent elections, a single-chambered legislature,
joint and individual initiative of laws, compulsory referendum, the
right of recall of all laws including the constitution, and appeal
to arbitration. A rigid constitution, augmenting in authority with
age and veneration, Roger Williams feared as acutely as did Paine
or Jefferson. To vest sovereignty in the courts through the right
of review and interpretation was repugnant to his whole political
theory. The fundamental law could be interpreted only by the power
that created it originally, namely, the sovereign people acting in
a political capacity. Within the larger framework of the state the
several towns retained the right of home rule in local matters. They
were corporations, erected like the church in the spirit of medieval
corporate law, competent to rule themselves, yet not infringing
on the sovereignty that granted them their powers. In short, to
adapt the words of a modern student, the state of Rhode Island as
erected by Roger Williams in accordance with the principles of his
political philosophy, was “nothing so much as a great public-service
corporation.”[66] Or, as another student has put it, “If democracy ...
in its ultimate meaning be held to imply not only a government in which
the preponderant share of power resides in the hands of the people, but
a society based on the principles of political and religious freedom,
Rhode Island beyond any other of the American Colonies is entitled to
be called democratic.”[67]
It was a hazardous experiment to undertake in an age when the ark
of the democratic covenant found few places of refuge. Its friends
were only a handful and its enemies many and powerful, and had it not
been for a group of defenders in Parliament, the Rhode Island venture
would have been brought to a speedy end. English Independency saved
for America what English Presbyterianism would have destroyed. To Sir
Harry Vane Rhode Island owes a debt of gratitude second only to that
due Roger Williams. But though its godly neighbors were not permitted
to destroy Rhode Island, they were free to slander and spread evil
reports, and so thoroughly did they do their work that for upwards of
two hundred years the little commonwealth was commonly spoken of in
such terms as Rogues Island and the State of Confusion; not indeed,
till it left off following agrarian and Populistic gods, till it had
ceased to be democratic, did it become wholly respectable. It was not
so much the reputed turbulence of Rhode Island that was disapproved by
the Boston magistrates; but rather the disturbing example of a colony
at their very doors, which, in denying the right of the godly to police
society, gave encouragement to evil-disposed persons in their own sober
commonwealth. Every democracy, they believed, was so notoriously mad
and lawless--as both sacred and profane authorities had sufficiently
demonstrated--that the Boston oligarchy never forgave Parliament
for refusing them permission to establish a mandatory over their
self-willed neighbors.
It was to prevent such meddling that Roger Williams had been at pains
to secure a Parliamentary charter; and he saw to it that the charter
terms should not restrict the democratic liberties. His faith in the
sobriety and good sense of the people of Rhode Island was never shaken.
In spite of many difficulties that grew out of the sharp individualism
of vigorous characters, the colony proved to be a good place to dwell
for those who were content to share the common rights and privileges.
In a letter to Vane, written in 1654, the founder apologizes for some
of the things reported of them, but the apology does not detract from
the just pride with which he contemplated the solid achievements of the
Rhode Island experiment:
Possibly a sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton. We have long
drunk of the cup of as great liberties as any people we can hear of
under the whole heaven. We have not only been long free (together
with all New England) from the iron yolk of wolfish bishops, and
their popish ceremonies ... but we have sitten quiet and dry from
the streams of blood spilt by that war in our native Country. We
have not felt the new chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor in this
colony have we been consumed with the over-zealous fire of the
(so called) godly christian magistrates. Sir, we have not known
what an excise means; we have almost forgotten what tithes are,
yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth. We could name
other special privileges, ingredients of our sweet cup, which your
great wisdom knows to be very powerful (except more than ordinary
watchfulness) to render the best of men wanton and forgetful.[68]
England gave her best when she sent us Roger Williams. A great thinker
and a bold innovator, the repository of the generous liberalisms of
a vigorous age, he brought with him the fine wheat of long years of
English tillage to sow in the American wilderness. How much America
owes to him is perhaps, after all the intervening years, not adequately
realized; the shadow of Massachusetts Bay still too much obscures
the large proportions of one who was certainly the most generous,
most open-minded, most lovable, of the Puritan emigrants--the truest
Christian amongst many who sincerely desired to be Christian. He
believed in men and in their native justice, and he spent his life
freely in the cause of humanity. Neither race nor creed sundered
him from his fellows; the Indian was his brother equally with the
Englishman. He was a Leveler because he was convinced that society
with its caste institutions dealt unjustly with the common man; he was
a democrat because he believed that the end and object of the political
state was the common well-being; he was an iconoclast because he was
convinced that the time had come when a new social order must be
erected on the decay of the old. “_Liberavi animam meam_,” he said with
just pride; “I have not hid within my _breast_ my _souls_ belief.” “It
was more than forty years after his exile that he lived here,” wrote
Cotton Mather, “and in many thinges acquitted himself so laudably, that
many juditious persons judged him to have the root of the matter in
him, during the long winter of this retirement.” Since those words were
written increasing numbers of “juditious persons” have come to agree
with the reluctant judgment of Cotton Mather, and are verily persuaded
that Master Roger Williams “had the root of the matter in him.” In his