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The Great Controversy
full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.”—Martyn,
vol. 5, pp. 70, 71.
It was the desire for liberty of conscience that inspired the Pilgrims
to brave the perils of the long journey across the sea, to endure the
hardships and dangers of the wilderness, and with God’s blessing to lay,
on the shores of America, the foundation of a mighty nation. Yet honest
and God-fearing as they were, the Pilgrims did not yet comprehend the
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great principle of religious liberty. The freedom which they sacrificed
so much to secure for themselves, they were not equally ready to grant
to others. “Very few, even of the foremost thinkers and moralists of the
seventeenth century, had any just conception of that grand principle,
the outgrowth of the New Testament, which acknowledges God as the
sole judge of human faith.”—Ibid. 5:297. The doctrine that God has
committed to the church the right to control the conscience, and to
define and punish heresy, is one of the most deeply rooted of papal
errors. While the Reformers rejected the creed of Rome, they were
not entirely free from her spirit of intolerance. The dense darkness
in which, through the long ages of her rule, popery had enveloped
all Christendom, had not even yet been wholly dissipated. Said one
of the leading ministers in the colony of Massachusetts Bay: “It was
toleration that made the world antichristian; and the church never took
harm by the punishment of heretics.”—Ibid., vol. 5, p. 335. The
regulation was adopted by the colonists that only church members
should have a voice in the civil government. A kind of state church
was formed, all the people being required to contribute to the support
of the clergy, and the magistrates being authorized to suppress heresy.
Thus the secular power was in the hands of the church. It was not long
before these measures led to the inevitable result—persecution.
Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger Williams
came to the New World. Like the early Pilgrims he came to enjoy
religious freedom; but, unlike them, he saw—what so few in his
time had yet seen—that this freedom was the inalienable right of all,
whatever might be their creed. He was an earnest seeker for truth,
with Robinson holding it impossible that all the light from God’s
word had yet been received. Williams “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.”—Bancroft, pt.
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1, ch. 15, par. 16. He declared it to be the duty of the magistrate to