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The Great Controversy 1888
Attendance at the services of the established church was required
under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “Williams reprobated the law;
the worst statute of 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 like requiring hypocrisy. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘should be forced
to worship, or to maintain a worship, against his own consent.’ ‘What!’
exclaimed his antagonist, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer
worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from those who hire him.’”
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.” 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 fed
me in the wilderness;” and a hollow tree often served him for a shelter.
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 the first
State of modern times that in the fullest sense recognized the right
of religious freedom. The fundamental principle of Roger Williams’
colony, was “that every man should have the right to worship God
according to the light of his conscience.” His little State, Rhode Island,
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became the asylum of the oppressed, and it increased and prospered
until its foundation principles—civil and religious liberty—became
the corner-stones of the American Republic.
In that grand old document which our forefathers set forth as their
bill of rights—the Declaration of Independence—they declared: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that