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restrain crime, but never to control the conscience. “The public or the
magistrates may decide,” he said, “what is due from man to man; but
when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they are out of
place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear that if the magistrate
has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs today and
another tomorrow; as has been done in England by different kings and
queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman Church; so
that belief would become a heap of confusion.”—Martyn, vol. 5, p.
340.
Attendance at the services of the established church was required
under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “Williams reprobated the law;
the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce
attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those
of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural
rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling,
seemed only like requiring hypocrisy.... ‘No one should be bound
to worship, or,’ he added, ‘to maintain a worship, against his own
consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is
not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from them that
hire him.’”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 2.
Roger Williams was respected and beloved as a faithful minister, a
man of rare gifts, of unbending integrity and true benevolence; yet his
steadfast denial of the right of civil magistrates to authority over the
church, and his demand for religious liberty, could not be tolerated.
The application of this new doctrine, it was urged, would “subvert the
fundamental state and government of the country.”—Ibid., pt. 1, ch.
15, par. 10. He was sentenced to banishment from the colonies, and,
finally, to avoid arrest, he was forced to flee, amid the cold and storms
of winter, into the unbroken forest.
“For fourteen weeks,” he says, “I was sorely tossed in a bitter
season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” But “the ravens
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fed me in the wilderness,” and a hollow tree often served him for a
shelter.—Martyn, vol. 5, pp. 349, 350. Thus he continued his painful
flight through the snow and the trackless forest, until he found refuge
with an Indian tribe whose confidence and affection he had won while
endeavoring to teach them the truths of the gospel.
Making his way at last, after months of change and wandering,
to the shores of Narragansett Bay, he there laid the foundation of