Pilgrim Fathers
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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.” 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
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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.” 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 re-
ligious 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
assert, in its plenitude, the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the
equality of opinions before the law.” He declared it to be the duty of
the magistrate to restrain crime, but never to control the conscience.
“The public or the magistrates may decide,” he said, “what is due from
men to men, but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duty 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 the different popes and councils in
the Roman Church; so that belief would become a heap of confusion.”
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