📘 A History of the Baptists (selections) — Thomas Armitage

1. Succession or Truth? How Armitage Traces Baptist History

Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Introductory Chapter, “Have We a Visible Succession of Baptist Churches down from the Apostles?” (pp. 1–12). Abridged; omissions marked […]. English text from uncollated OCR; paragraph divisions supplied by CTS. The interpretations are the author’s.

CTS note: Armitage (1819–1896), a Baptist pastor in New York, wrote this introduction against the “succession” view, later popularized by Landmark Baptists and the booklet The Trail of Blood, which holds that Baptist churches descend from the apostles through an unbroken chain of congregations. His own view, that Baptist identity rests on faithfulness to the New Testament rather than on a visible line, is close to that of most historians today, who date the first Baptist churches to English Separatists in Holland and England about 1609–1612 (John Smyth, Thomas Helwys), while recognizing that earlier groups such as the Waldenses held some similar convictions. Some Baptists still hold to church succession. His remarks about the Catholic Church reflect the sharp Protestant–Catholic controversy of the nineteenth century; Catholic teaching on apostolic succession is described here by an opponent, not in its own terms. A passage quoting Matthew Arnold and Goethe has been omitted.

Introductory Chapter. Have We a Visible Succession of Baptist Churches down from the Apostles?

On the western coast of India, near Goa, and also in the Mediterranean, springs of fresh water, which do not rise to the surface but are run off by the undercurrent, rush out of the strata at the bottom of the sea. But in the Gulf of Xagua, on the southern coast of Cuba, a wonderful fountain of fresh water gurgles up in the open sea; forcing aside its salt waters, it passes off in the surface-current and is lost in the ocean. From this spring navigators often draw their supplies of pure water in the midst of the briny waste. Here nature lends us a forceful type of the fact that there may be a flow of visible succession without purity, and that there may be continuous purity without a flow of visible succession. Is an unbroken, visible, and historical succession of independent Gospel Churches down from the apostles, essential to the valid existence of Baptist Churches to-day, as apostolic in every sense of the word?

This question suggests another, namely, Of what value could any lineal succession be, as compared with present adherence to apostolic truth? From these two questions a third arises: Whether true lineage from the Apostolic Churches does not rest in present conformity to the apostolic pattern, even though the local church of to-day be self-organized, from material that never came out of any church, provided, that it stands on the apostolicity of the New Testament alone. The simple truth is, that the unity of Christ's kingdom on earth is not found in its visibility, any more than the unity of the solar system is found in that direction, for its largest domain never falls under the inspection of any being but God. So, likewise, the unity of Christianity is not found by any visible tracing through one set of people. It has been enwrapped in all who have followed purely apostolic principles through the ages; and thus the purity of Baptist life is found in the essence of their doctrines and practices by whomsoever enforced.

Little perception is required to discover the fallacy of a visible apostolical succession in the ministry, but visible Church succession is precisely as fallacious, and for exactly the same reasons. The Catholic is right in his theory that these two must stand or fall together; hence he assumes, ipso facto, that all who are not in this double succession are excluded from the true apostolic line. And many who are not Catholics think that if they fail to unroll a continuous succession of regularly organized churches, they lose their genealogy by a break in the chain, and so fail to prove that they are legitimate Apostolic Churches. Such evidence cannot be traced by any Church on earth, and would be utterly worthless if it could, because the real legitimacy of Christianity must be found in the New Testament, and nowhere else. The very attempt to trace an unbroken line of persons duly baptized upon their personal trust in Christ, or of ministers ordained by lineal descent from the apostles, or of churches organized upon these principles, and adhering to the New Testament in all things, is in itself an attempt to erect a bulwark of error.

Only God can make a new creature; and the effort to trace Christian history from regenerate man to regenerate man, implies that man can impart some power to keep up a succession of individual Christians. Apply the same thought to groups of churches running down through sixty generations, and we have precisely the same result. The idea is the very life of Catholicism. Our only reliable ground in opposition to this system is: That if no trace of conformity to the New Testament could be found in any Church since the end of the first century, a Church established to-day upon the New Testament life and order, would be as truly a historical Church from Christ, as the Church planted by Paul at Ephesus. Robert Robinson has well said: 'Uninterrupted succession is a specious lure, a snare set by sophistry, into which all parties have fallen.

And it has happened to spiritual genealogists as it has to others who have traced natural descents, both have woven together twigs of every kind to fill up remote chasms. The doctrine is necessary only to such Churches as regulate their faith and practice by tradition, and for their use it was first invented. . . . Protestants, by the most substantial arguments, have blasted the doctrine of papal succession, and yet these very Protestants have undertaken to make proof of an unbroken series of persons, of their own sentiments, following one another in due order from the apostles to themselves.' Sanctity is the highest title to legitimacy in the kingdom of God, because holiness, meekness, and self-consecration to Christ are the soul of real Church life; and without this pedigree, antiquity cannot make Church existence even reverent. This sanctity is evinced by the rejection of error and the choice of truth, in all matters which the New Testament has enjoined, either by precept or example.

In things of light import, demanding a robust common sense, the noble and courteous spirit of Jesus must be maintained, for personal holiness is the highest test of Christianity in all its historical relations. But this matter of visible Church succession is organically connected with the idea of Church infallibility, rather than of likeness to Christ. The twin doctrines were born of the same parentage, and the one implies the other, for a visible succession must be pure in all its parts, that is, infallible; if it is corrupt in some things, no logical showing can make it perfect. Truth calls us back to the radical view, that any Church which bears the real apostolic stamp is in direct historical descent from the apostles, without relation to any other Church past or present. In defense of this position the following considerations are submitted to all candid minds:

I. That Christ never established a law of Christian primogeniture by which he endowed local churches with the exclusive power of moral regeneration, making it necessary for one church to be the mother of another, in regular succession, and without which they could not be legitimate churches. Those who organized the churches in apostolic times went forth simply with the lines of doctrine and order in their hands, and formed new churches without the authority or even the knowledge of other churches. Some of these men were neither apostles nor pastors, but private Christians. Men are born of God in regeneration and not of the Church. They have no ancestry in regeneration, much less are they the offspring of an organic ancestry. The men who composed the true Churches at Antioch and Rome were 'born from above,' making the Gospel and not the Church the agency by which men are 'begotten of God.'

This Church succession figment shifts the primary question of Christian life from the apostolic ground of truth, faith and obedience, to the Romanistic doctrine of persons, and renders an historic series of such persons necessary to administer the ordinances and impart valid Church life. How does inspiration govern this matter? 'Whoso abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God; he that abideth in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the Son. If any man cometh to you and bringeth not this teaching, receive him not.' Pure doctrine, as it is found uncorrupted in the word of God, is the only unbroken line of succession which can be traced in Christianity. God never confided his truth to the personal succession of any body of men; man was not to be trusted with the custody of this precious charge, but the King of the truth has kept the keys of the truth in his own hand.

The true Church of Christ has ever been that which has stood upon his person and work. Whitaker, treating of this blunder of the hierarchy, says, 'Faith, therefore, is, as it were, the soul of the succession; which, being wanting, a naked succession of persons is a dead body.' Tertullian says, 'If any of the heretics dare to connect themselves with the Apostolic Age, that they may seem to be derived from the Apostles, as existing under them, we may say: Let them, therefore, declare the origin of their Churches, let them exhibit the series of their bishops, as coming down by a continued succession from the beginning, as to show their first bishop to have been some apostle or apostolic man as his predecessor or ordainer, and who continued in the same faith with the Apostles. For this is the way in which the Apostolical Churches calculate the series of their bishops.'

Ambrose takes the same ground, thus: 'They have not the inheritance, are not the successors of Peter who have not the faith of Peter.' Gregory (Nazianzen), in defending the right of Athanasius, to the chair of Alexandria, against his opponent, uses these words: 'This succession of piety ought to be esteemed the true succession, for he who maintains the same doctrine of faith is partner in the same chair; but he who defends the contrary doctrine, ought, though in the chair of St. Mark, to be esteemed an adversary to it. This man, indeed, may have a nominal succession, but the other has the very thing itself, the succession in deed and in truth.' Calvin's view is in harmony with this testimony; he says: 'I deny the succession scheme as a thing entirely without foundation. . . . This question of being successors of the Apostles must be decided by an examination of the doctrines maintained.'

Zanchius gives the same view: 'When personal succession, alone, is boasted of, the purity of true Christian doctrine having departed, there is no legitimate ministry, seeing that both the Church and the ministry of the Church are bound not to persons, but to the word of God.' Bradford, the martyr, truly said of the Church, that she is 'Not tied to succession, but to the word of God.' And Stillingfleet says, with spirit: 'Let succession know its place, and learn to vaile bonnet to the Scriptures. The succession so much pleaded by the writers of the primitive Church was not a succession of persons in apostolic power, but a succession of apostolic doctrine.' On this ground it follows, that those who hold to a tangible succession of Baptist Churches down from the Apostolic Age, must prove from the Scriptures that something besides holiness and truth is an essential sign of the Church of God.

The whole pseudo-apostolic scheme, from its foundation, was a creation of the hierarchy for the purposes of tyranny. The question of veracity is of vastly more moment in Baptist history than that of antiquity. Veracity accepts all truth without regard to time; gathering it up, and putting it on record exactly as it has been known through the centuries. Historic truth has many parts in harmony with each other, but the hard and fast lines of visible succession are those of a mere system and not those of true history. The Bible is the deep in which the ocean of Gospel truth lies, and all its streams must harmonize with their source, and not with a dreamy, sentimental origin. As it is not a Gospel truth that Christ has lodged the power of spiritual procreation in his Churches, so it is not true that all who come not of any given line of Church stock are alien and illegitimate.

II. Our Lord never promised an organic visibility to his Church in perpetuity, amongst any people or in any age. He endowed his Church with immortal life when he said: 'The gates of hell (Hades) shall not prevail against it.' But this has nothing to do with the question of a traceable or hidden existence. He gives his pledge that his Church shall not perish, and he has secured to her this stability. The forces of death have proudly dashed themselves against her a thousand times, but despite their rage, she stands firmly built on a 'Rock.' She has been driven into the wilderness again and again, as a helpless woman, to find a home as best she could. Its fastnesses, wastes, dens and caves, have invited her to their secrecy and shelter; but though her members have been driven like chaff before the wind, she has never been destroyed.

An army is not overthrown when withdrawn from the field, it is retired only to make it indestructible. A grain of wheat enswathed and hidden in a pyramid for thousands of years grows as fresh as ever when brought back to light and moisture. So Christ signally evinces his watch-care over his Church when he brings her into a secret retreat for safety, or as John expresses it, into 'her place prepared by God,' that she may be 'nourished for a time,' to come forth stronger than ever. Men have often thought the Church dead, first amongst this people and then that, when she was more alive than ever for her occasional invisibility. At such times her organization has been broken, her ordinances suspended, her officers slain, her members ground to powder; but she has come forth again, not in a new array of the same persons, but in the revival of old truths amongst a new people, to reproduce new and illustrious examples of faithful men.

Christianity has been one web through which the golden band of truth has been visible from edge to edge at times, then a mere thread has been seen, then it has been fully covered by the warp. But anon, it has re-appeared as bright as ever, from its long invisibility. III. Christ never promised to his churches their absolute preservation from error. He promised his Spirit to lead his Apostles into all truth, and kept his word faithfully when they wrote and spoke as the Spirit moved them. But when he had finished the inspired rule for their guidance, he did not vouchsafe to keep them pure, nolens volens. They might mix error and false doctrine with his truth, and disgrace themselves by corrupting admixtures; but the loss and responsibility were theirs. To have pledged them unmixed purity for all time despite their own self-will was to endow them with infallibility, which is precisely the doctrine of Rome, and a contradiction of all reliable history.

Even in the first century there was great defection from the truth, as the Epistles show. Some of them were written, indeed, for the express purposes of correcting error, especially the latter writings of Paul and John. From the second to the fourth century, we find a rapid departure from inspired truth, with many sects, and no churches exactly after the Apostolic order. Some few men, original thinkers who followed no man's teachings, broke loose from the leadership of all. They went independently to the text of Scripture, but stood single-handed, and took with them some error from which they could not free themselves, so that they fell below their own ideal; and the original model was not restored for some length of time. Nay, more than this even is true. Those organic bodies of men who were drawn together into reformed churches, were moved by mixed motives, and in attempting a new order of things, few of them came up to the New Testament standard in all respects.

And the failure to reach that standard in all churches has been so marked as to render it vain to look for a visible line of succession, which constitutes the only true Church descent from Apostolic times to ours. Some churches have been faithful to one divine truth and some to another, but none have embodied all the truth, and few individual men now known to us have kept all the requisitions of the Gospel. This principle of infallibility and Church succession is the central corruption of Rome, and has so polluted her faith that she scarcely holds any truth purely, both in the abstract and the concrete. She believes in the proper Deity of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit, — in the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead, — in the authenticity and inspiration of the Scriptures, — in the doctrines of incarnation and atonement,— and in eternal glory and retribution.

But which of these has she not modified and perverted, under the pretense that she is endowed with Catholicity and perpetual visibility, as the rightful Church Apostolic, all her defilement to the contrary? and now she makes her errors her real life. What is true of the hierarchy is equally true, in this respect, of most of the bodies which have protested against and shaken off her chief heresies. They clung to some truths which she trod under foot, but they hugged some of her errors as closely as she hugged them, defended them as stoutly, and often persecuted unto death those who differed with them, even in minor matters. IV. The world is vastly more indebted to a line of individual men who have contended for the truth, each by himself, than to any organic churches which can be traced by visible succession from the Apostles, under any name whatever.

In religion, as in other departments of life, great movements have almost always centered in one or two isolated individuals, who have become immensely influential, by first turning their eyes upon the needs of their own souls, without human aid, and generally in opposition to all organizations. External influences had little to do in shaping their powers. They were molded above and in advance of their age, and created a new life for all about them, often far outside of their native sphere. First of all they were obliged to escape from and master themselves, then they led their times into a higher and purer godliness. God wrought some grand consummation by them without the aid of any local church, under those uniform laws of truth by which Christ's kingdom has ever been governed. These powerful examples, scattered through the centuries, show that not organic association, but regenerated manhood makes true history, as we might expect from the fact, that the foundation of Gospel obedience is laid in the deep soul-convictions of individual men.

The most marked discoveries and advancements of history have been made, not on the plans of concerted bodies, but by individual minds. Galileo seized the idea of the telescope from a casual glance at a boy holding a tube to his eye; and Newton found the law that binds the universe in a falling apple. So, the few who have been impregnated with holy purposes, saturated through and through with fidelity to Christ, have arisen in imperial strength to vindicate his truth; these are the Alpine peaks that mark the centuries. Their love to Christ held their action responsible to him, and made its final results safe. Religious systems arose out of their personal exertions, but when did a religious system create a new life, after the first century? Baptists are greater debtors to such a train of men than to any train of churches that can be named. This great law of individuality has not escaped the notice of skeptics.

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A great mind of our day avows, 'That in the whole period from the sixth to the tenth century, there were not in all Europe more than three or four men who dared to think for themselves;' and even they were not classed with the creators of their age. They were neither rulers nor statesmen, but quiet and unobserved suggesters, who discovered abuses and pointed out remedies which future times were proud to apply. Chiefly through this order of mind we are to trace the record of Baptist sentiments, but the name 'Baptist' must not mislead us to enlist into our ranks men who would be unworthy of that name to-day, simply because they held some things in common with ourselves. Rather, we must embrace only those who cherished in full, the conception which both the New Testament Baptists and those of the nineteenth century set forth as underlying the entire kingdom of Christ.

It is in the embodiment of these principles, whether in individuals or churches, that we are to look for true Baptist history. Because they are imbedded in the Bible we bow to their holy teachings, the antiquity of principles being quite another thing from the antiquity of organizations. As doctrines and practices originated in after times are late and new, we must reverence that antiquity alone which God uttered in the beginning. A system running through ages is an empty boast unless it reproduces the vital, spiritual copy of the first age. For seventy years the Jews lost the line of the Passover, when Jerusalem lay in heaps and Israel was enslaved in Babylon, but when Hezekiah brought them back and restored the feast, the seventy missing links of festivity came with them. Two generations of their people had died and certain of their tribes were never heard of again, yet their true history as Jews was not broken nor the significancy of the Passover impaired, 'although they had not done it of a long time in such sort as it is written.'

The moment that the Temple was rebuilt, its doors opened, and its lamps relit, the old authority of the institution revived. No Jewish household now living can trace its descent to any given tribe which existed at the fall of Jerusalem, A. D. 70. All have been so scattered and intermixed amongst themselves and the Gentiles, that tribal lines are entirely obliterated; yet none will deny that they are the direct descendants of Abraham. The principles above set forth are not those which have been generally adopted in Baptist history. But the writer is persuaded that they are the only true channel through which it can be traced, and by which Baptists can be made a unit with Apostolic Churches, while visible descent and the unbroken succession of churches are not and cannot be a proper test in the matter. We enjoy the right of self-government in the United States by a regular descent of democracy from the Roman Republic, but it is impossible to trace its course by a line of democracies to which our own is the successor.

But the two, separated so widely in point of time, are essentially the same in their liberties. Individuals have asserted the rights of man in every country, and bands have struggled to embody them in every government, but who will say that these have not been the true patriots of the world, because a perpetual and visible line of organized republics has not come down to us, side by side with a similar line of despotic governments? Historical truth applies the same processes to the several streams of natural science. Certain families and tribes are found in vegetable and animal life; that is to say, a given type multiplies itself into groups, sequence being our guide; yet no scientist discards faith in the existence of a type, because he cannot trace its visible sequence, while again and again he finds its outward course strangely resumed. So we speak of a people known as 'Baptists,' who have been substantially of one order of religious faith and practice, and have been made so by one order of religious principle.

If crushed at one time, or entirely driven out of sight, others bearing the same Apostolic stamp and force have come forth to fill their places, under other names. A sunbeam is a sunbeam, no matter upon what putrescence it may fall, or with what pollution it may mingle; and by a ray of this character we thread our way from Christ down in ecclesiastical life. But the pretense that any one communion now on earth can trace its way down from the Apostles, in one line of fidelity and purity to New Testament teachings, is to contradict all reliable history. Dr. Abel Stevens says: 'Obscure communities, as the Cathari or Novatians, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses, maintained the ancient faith in comparative purity from the beginning of the fourth century down to the Reformation.' These and other sects held one or more distinctive Baptist principles, but none of them were thorough Baptists, through and through.

A Baptist church is a congregation, and not a denomination of congregations, and find it in what nook we may, if it can trace its doctrines to the Apostles it is an Apostolic Church. 'A church,' says Dr. Ripley, 'that came into existence yesterday, in strict conformity to the New Testament principles of membership, far away from any long-existing church or company of churches, and therefore unable to trace an outward lineal descent, is a true Church of Christ. . . . While a church so-called, not standing on the Apostolic principles of faith and practice, and yet able to look back through a long line up to time immemorial, may have never belonged to that body of which Christ is the Head.' The reader of religious history must be as honest as its writer, for the one is as much exposed to bias as the other.

Yet, the exact facts which are found by the truthful historian are often condemned unweighed, because they are unpalatable; and true chronicles are often buried under the abuse which they heap upon their subject. For some reason much of this unfairness crops out, with many, whenever the truths of the New Testament are under consideration. Hence a man only honors himself and the vital teachings of the Holy Spirit when he separates himself from all that is superficial in his own methods of examination. Above all people, Baptists should be content to separate their history from all questionable material, and to write and read it in the form in which facts have cast it, its complete touchstone being conformity to the Gospel. Those only have been Baptists who have conformed to this rule, from age to age, without addition or subtraction. Error must eternally remain error, and no antiquity can sanctify it into truth.

For all the ends of truth merely venerable custom is weak; yet, if a supreme love of truth does not force it back, it will dominate the mind through the senses, which are captivated by the hoary. As the dykes of Holland repel the approaches of the sea, so Baptists can only receive the fairest provinces of truth by resisting ancient custom, simply because it is ancient. Ecclesiastical custom is as mutable as its maker, and yet, when an old practice conflicts with the New Testament, many make that practice the true interpretation of God's word without questioning its authority. Although not one jot has been added to the truth since the death of the Apostle John, the bare antiquity of tradition enshrines it in the faith of many, especially if it came down from one of the so-called 'Fathers.' A late able scholar of Dr. Wayland's illustrated the feeling of many on this subject.

He asked whether, if the doctor had lived near the time of Paul, his word would not have been weightier than that of other men. The great tutor replied, 'Yes, provided Paul had said in his writings, "I leave Francis Wayland my interpreter."' And if not, how could he have interpreted an apostle better than any one else, without special inspiration from God? The noblest minds are often crippled by this straining after uninspired antiquity, under the notion that it must touch the divine, without reaching after Christ's infallible ideal, when it stands openly before their eyes. Baptist historians have always written against great odds. Commonly those who rejected our principles in past ages were filled with bitterness, and destroyed the best sources of exact data in the shape of treatise, narrative and record. The hated party was weak, and the dominant sought its destruction. Often these helpless victims of tyranny were obliged to destroy their own documents, lest discovery should overwhelm them in calamity.

We shall see also that while many of the old sects were more or less imbued with Baptist principles, each had its own class of deductions, convictions and practices. In consequence, what was a cherished faith with one was held in contempt by another, and these states of mind became a part of the men themselves. Their different stages of faith were different stages of consciousness; and it came to pass, that to oppose each other fiercely was to attain high fidelity. In the dreary weakness of human nature each man held his own sect virtuous and the other vicious, all the time forgetting that as relative bodies they modified each other, and were largely responsible for each other's conduct. Then, as the Baptists had control of no national government, they could not preserve their records as did others. They managed no legislation or system of civil jurisprudence, and could keep no archives, having no legal officers whose special business it was to store up and keep facts.

Necessarily, therefore, what few records they have left are fragmentary, without due continuity of register, and almost barren of vital events. The hand which carried the sword to smite this people, carried also the torch to burn up their books, and their authors were reduced to ashes by the flames of their own literature. The material for building up their chronicles is both crude and scanty. The governing life of a people, and not circumstances alone, gives value to their claim, and so we are thrown back on principle and hard generalization. If Baptist history be peculiar, it is only because they have been a peculiar people. Their enemies have always accounted them 'heretics,' whose prime value was to keep a cold world warm by their use as fuel for the stake. Men have never been willing to understand them, because they never would accept them on their own showings but have insisted on measuring them by other standards than their own.

With a great price they obtained their freedom, and their radical individualism made them appear to other men as disturbing and even violent. In turn, almost every man's hand has been against them, and as a people of but one book, they have taken a fixed and sturdy character, which has made them look as if their hand was against every man. What Burke said of Americans, in another line, is true of them in their devotion to the Bible, namely: 'In no country, perhaps, in the world, is the law so general a study.' We see, then, that Robinson, Crosby, Ivimey, Orchard, Jones, Backus, Benedict, Cramp, and other Baptist historians, have written under every possible disadvantage. Still, their work shows an instinctive love of the truth for the truth's sake, worthy of such veterans. Their spirituality is elevated, their piety without guile, their devotion to the Gospel ardent, and their historical acumen quite equal to that of other Church historians.

In the main, their leading facts and findings have not been proven untrustworthy, and no one has attempted to show that their general conclusions are untenable. Possibly, their chief mistake has lodged in the attempt to find the stray and casual links of a certain order of churches which may, by accommodation, be called Baptist. The design of this work will be, to follow certain truths through the ages, on that radical Protestant principle which professes to discard the Romish claim of catholicity and succession, and so to follow certain truths down to their chief conservators of this time, the Baptists. By this method we can best understand their battles with error and power, their defeats and victories. In general history no writer will be content to seek a succession of kings and courts, of warriors and bloody fields, but he will find truth in the social and civil life of a people, in the march of constitutional freedom, and the phenomena of human elevation.

The best service that can be rendered to the Baptists is, to trace the noiseless energy and native immortality of the doctrines which they hold, after all their conflicts, to the glory of Christ, for it is exactly here that we see their excellency as a people. If it can be shown that their churches are the most like the Apostolic that now exist, and that the elements which make them so have passed successfully through the long struggle, succession from the times of their blessed Lord gives them the noblest history that any people can crave. To procure a servile imitation of merely primitive things has never been the mission of Baptists. Their work has been to promote the living reproduction of New Testament Christians, and so to make the Christlike old, the ever delightfully new. Their perpetually fresh appeal to the Scriptures as the only warrant for their existence at all must not be cut off, in a foolish attempt to turn the weapons of the hierarchy against itself.

The sword of the Spirit must still be their only arm of service, offensive and defensive. An appeal to false credentials now would not only cut them off from their old roll of honor, but it would sever them from the use of all that now remains undiscovered and unapplied in the word of God. The distinctive attribute in the kingdom of Christ is life; not an historic life, but a life supernatural, flowing eternally from Christ alone by his living truth. Such existence does not claim the right of long possession in this soil or that, or through this or that course of time; nor is this the best title by which Baptists can prove their heirship to their fair inheritance. So far from their right to live inhering in organic ancestry by ancient descent, their right to be, in the nineteenth century, comes by their oneness with the truth given by Christ in the first century.

Their present possession of that truth, is the testimony to their unity with an endless life, is their only authority for existence at any time, with or without human records, and shuts out all other considerations. The life of all Gospel churches must center in the truth which has come down unscathed from Jesus Christ; we must find it here or nowhere, and there can be no course, extreme or via media which applies the true test of Church life but this. A human figment may serve the ends of Catholicism, but as Baptists are not Romanists, only Christ and Apostolicity as they are found in the Divine Writings can suffice for them. The spirit and outcome of these in their normal form afford the staple for genuine Baptist History.

2. The Peasants’ War, Münster, and the Anabaptist Question

Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Chapter IV, “The Reformation—Peasants’ War—Mühlhausen and Münster” (about pp. 363–378). Abridged; omissions marked […]. English text from uncollated OCR; paragraph divisions supplied by CTS. The interpretations are the author’s.

CTS note: Armitage calls the peaceful Swiss, South German and Dutch believers “Baptists” and keeps the name “Anabaptists” for the violent party at Münster (1534–35). Historians today call all these groups Anabaptists. They agree that most Anabaptists were peaceful and that Münster was exceptional, but they see a more varied radical Reformation than Armitage’s sharp division allows: Hubmaier (Hubmeyer), for example, did not reject the sword, and the claim that the Dutch Baptists descended from the Waldenses is not generally accepted. His treatment of Luther and of the Catholic clergy is polemical, written to answer Catholic and Protestant writers who blamed Baptists for Münster. The bigamy of Philip of Hesse and the reformers’ secret advice of 1539 are historical, but some sayings attributed to Luther are paraphrases or are quoted out of context. Several pages of the scan are missing or unreadable in this OCR and are marked [illegible]; a fragmentary page and two passages on clerical immorality and medieval baptismal customs have been omitted.

Chapter IV. The Reformation—Peasants' War—Mühlhausen and Münster

The Peasants' War of A. D. 1525-26 shook Southern and Central Germany. The age was in a fever of political excitement, and this war was not an affair of religious doctrine but of political liberty and the natural rights of man. The first German conqueror took possession and then gave lands in fee to his officers or lords, and in turn these bound their dependants to servile occupancy. The citizens took rank as nobles and 'villains,' and all others were serfs, the serfs going with the soil on which they were born. They could not leave their master's domain nor appeal from his authority, nor could he sell them. He took to himself the common pastures, the fish and game, exacting high rents or tithes, and they must submit or revolt. He also forced his religion upon them and made them act through the religious idea, their knowledge being narrowed down to a few notions on that subject.

For ages Germany had boasted that liberty was the birthright of her people, boor and prince. Her primitive Teutonic population were farmers and graziers, who wandered without landmark or fixed habitation. Then, they formed themselves into little States under a kind of land ownership but with few conventional restrictions or claims to the perpetual right of property. In time, however, estates shaped themselves after the map of restricted society and revenue became hereditary. Thus feudal tenures sprang up, defense became necessary and authority grew, wealth increased, military power and imperial rule followed, with all the exactions of blind obedience. Under this yoke the peasant was uneasy for ages, periodically [illegible] for the pure word of God and the right to choose their own pastors; for their exemption from all tithes except that of wheat, of which they would pay a tenth for the support of their pastors and the poor; for relief from bondage and from such obedience to the magistrates as it is not lawful for Christians to render: for justice administered fairly and firmly according to plain, written laws; and for permission to fish in the rivers and hunt in the forests.

They back each article with a forceful passage of Scripture, because, in some way, they had come to believe that Christ intended men to possess rights of conscience. They say: 'Christ bought and redeemed us by his precious blood, the shepherd as well as the noblest, none being excepted; wherefore, it accords with Scripture that we are and will be free.' They close by promising that if any of these demands be unjust they shall have no force. These articles were read publicly in every place and adopted by the people. They marched triumphantly into Würtzburg; and before long, Spires, the Palatinate, Alsace, Hesse and other great centers adopted the articles. Many of the upper classes, Catholics and Reformers, put themselves at the head of the peasants. The general uprising took place by concert January 1st, 1525; as a signal, the Convent of Kempton was captured and from that moment the country was in a blaze from the Rhine to the frontier of Bohemia.

Monasteries, castles and cities were destroyed, and every kind of excess was committed by 300,000 men in arms, maddened by intolerable oppression to the desperation of despair. All this took place ten years before the madness of Münster, showing it to be but an incident in the long German uproar. We see here how religion entered the contests of the Peasants' War and by whom it was introduced. It is simply absurd to say that these peasants were 'Anabaptists.' Did they demand the right to choose their own pastors because their masters had forced unwelcome 'Anabaptist' shepherds upon them? The peasants were Catholics and Lutherans, and their enforced ministers were the same. Many of their masters were bishops and other clergy. The entire disturbance was simply the abnormal German mind forcing its way back in a crude manner to its native freedom, and the Anabaptists cannot for any purpose be made a stalking-horse, in the face of historic truth, to force a false issue to the front.

The chief actors in these scenes candidly lay before us the real facts. When the princes desired the Elector to aid them against the rebellion, he said to his brother, John: 'Cause has been given for the poor people to make this uproar. . . . They have been dealt hardly with in many ways by us rulers, both spiritual and temporal.' The deputies from Saxony and Hesse said in the Diet at Augsburg: 'The rising of the peasants was the effect of impolitic and [illegible] usage.' At first, Luther, being the son of a peasant, sympathized with his own race and said to the bishops: 'It is your guilty oppression of the poor of the flock which has driven the people to despair.' To the princes he said: 'My lords, it is not the peasants who have risen against you, it is God himself who is opposing your madness. Think not that you can escape the punishment reserved for you.'

[illegible] war much church property was put to secular uses, many high privileges and taxes were abolished, all princes but the Emperor were brought down to the democratic level of citizens, free courts were established, the clergy were restricted to their individual churches, and uniformity was given to weights, measures and currency. But these were not secured until the war had cost possibly 160,000 lives, and the burning of several hundred castles, convents, hamlets and towns. Sometimes Luther attempted to wash his hands in innocence of the whole affair, and then again he was willing to bear the whole responsibility, but others laid the blame at his door. Erasmus said to him: 'You disclaim any connection with the insurgents, while they regard you as the author and expounder of their principles.' A controversial writer of 1532 says: 'Luther first sounded the tocsin; he cannot clear himself from the rebellion, although he wrote that the common folks should not use force without the magistracy.

The common people do not hear that, but they observe whatever part of Luther's sermons and writings they please.' Osiander writes: 'When Luther saw the peasants attacking not only the bishops and clergy, but also his teaching and the princes, he preached their slaughter like that of wild beasts;' and the enemies of the peasants were as bitter toward him as the rebels themselves. In 1525 Amerbach received a letter from Zasius, in which the latter says: 'Luther, this pest of peace, this most pernicious of all two-legged beings, has plunged the whole of Germany into such a fury that one must regard it as a sort of security if he be not killed at once.' Sometimes, when looking round for a scape-goat, Luther attempted to throw the responsibility on 'the prophets of murder,' as he called the Zwickau men. But at other times he arrogated prerogatives to himself, for which, as Erasmus says, no parallel can be found, scarcely distinguishable from madness, and for which no apology can be made, such as this: 'I, Martin Luther, have slain all the peasants in the insurrection because I commanded them to be killed; their blood is upon my head.

But I put it upon the Lord God, by whose command I spoke.' These and many other facts sufficiently show why Gieseler says that 'no traces of Anabaptist fanaticism were seen' in the Peasants' War. Some individual 'Anabaptists' were drawn into the contest, as at Mühlhausen, under the lead of Münzer, who was not in any proper use of the term an 'Anabaptist' himself. On the contrary, Keller, in his late work on the 'Reformation' (p. 370), says that Cornelius has shown that in the chief points Münzer was opposed to the Baptists. It seemed an inevitable result that religious fanaticism should be thrown into a contest in which politico-religious questions formed the chief element, and especially where such a fiery spirit was allowed to come to the front. Yet it is questionable justice, whether even he ought to be blackened from head to foot. The true story of Thomas Münzer appears to be this. He was born in Stollberg, at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, A. D. 1490, and studied, some think at Wittenberg, others at Leipsic; that he took a degree as master of arts is clear, and that he had large knowledge of the Scriptures. After teaching in several places, he became a chaplain and confessor to the nuns [illegible]

Here is a most important point brought out clearly. If the Lutherans and Zwinglians were confounded with the 'wicked Anabaptists,' as our authors call the Münster men, how much more easily did both Catholics and Protestants come to confound the honest 'Baptists' with these madmen? The Dutch historians go on to state that: 'The Baptists suffered the most, yet the entire mass of the Protestants were more or less injured. This will appear if attention be directed to the edicts which since that time have been issued by the Emperor for the purpose of retarding the work of the Reformation. In these all Christians who separated from the Romish Church were called Anabaptists. . . . The Emperor and all his statesmen knew that the Baptists generally had, both by word and deed, testified that their peace-loving hearts abhorred the seditious conduct of the Anabaptists. . . .

In this manner the attempt was made to throw sand in the eyes of the superficial thinkers among the Romanists. It was no very difficult task to do this. Since the government comprehended all the Protestants under the general name of Anabaptists, the short-sighted Romanists, confiding in its superior discernment, could easily be brought to the same unfavorable [illegible] of view. . . . The Anabaptists seemed to them to be a lawless people, consisting partly of Baptists, partly of Zwinglians, partly of Lutherans — men who formerly adhered to the old Catholic faith, but who had now entirely renounced religion. . . . They would not see that which they might have seen. How evident it was that although the Baptists appeared to agree with the Anabaptists in respect to the baptismal question, the former entirely disapproved of the course pursued by the latter.

For it had been, and continued to be, a doctrine of the Baptists, that the bearing of arms was very unbecoming to a Christian. Did not the Anabaptists pursue a course directly the opposite of this? . . . Who could have imagined that such a purpose prevailed among the Baptists, who were the meekest of Christians? And yet the Romanists, without dissent, agree in ascribing these things to all the Baptists. We have nowhere seen clearer evidences of the injurious influence of the prejudice, nowhere have we met with a more obstinate unwillingness to be correctly informed, and a more evident disposition to silence those who better understood the truth of the matter. Prejudice, when once deeply imbibed, blinds the eye, perplexes the understanding, silences the instincts of the heart and destroys the love of truth and rectitude.

We shall now proceed more at length to notice the defense of the worthy Baptists. The Baptists are Protestant Christians entirely different from the Anabaptists in character. They were descendants from the Ancient Waldenses, whose teachings were evangelical and tolerably pure, and who were scattered by severe persecutions in various lands, and long before the time of the Reformation of the Church were existing in the Netherlands. In their flight they came thither in the latter part of the twelfth century. In this country and in Flanders, in Holland and Zealand they lived as quiet inhabitants, not intermeddling with the affairs of Church and State, in the villages tilling the land, and in the cities working at some trade or engaged in traffic, by which means each one was well supplied and in no respect burdensome to society. Their manner of life was simple and exemplary.

No great crime was known among them. Their religious teaching was simple and pure, and was exemplified in their daily conduct.' In 1524-25 Münster had risen and been subdued with the other cities of Southern and Central Germany, and things flowed once more in the old channel. Then in 1532, Rothmann, a very powerful Lutheran pastor of Münster, stirred it so effectually that six entire parishes fell into the hands of the Lutherans and [illegible] filling the magistracy, from oaths and the sword. In Switzerland, where the Peasants' War raged as violently as in Germany, they positively refused to unite their fortunes with the peasants, and their course there throws light upon their conduct in Germany. Grebel and Simon Stumpf, to their honor, sympathized with the down-trodden people, but their principles would not allow them to draw the sword.

Grebel branded the oppressors as 'the tyrants of our forefathers,' but he denied that he had ever thought of subverting government. When the Swiss peasantry revolted in the Grüningen district, they attacked the cloisters of Bubikon and Rüti with their Zwinglian pastors in their ranks. Their Baptist neighbors, meanwhile, gave them their moral support, but left the sword sheathed for conscience' sake. They relied upon the spirit and morals of the Gospel to enlighten the souls of the people, believing that this would work out their social liberties too. Hubmeyer aided the peasants at Waldshut much in the same way. Zimmerman, the historian of the Peasants' War, says: 'In Waldshut and the Evangelical Brotherhood there were heads capable of grasping the bold and great thought of uniting the forces of the peasants, split up as they were among countless leaders, in one purpose and aim: namely, the restoration of the old liberty of the empire, and the overthrow of existing un-Christian oppression.

To this end brotherhoods were formed and armed throughout the entire German empire, and communication by means of correspondence and messengers was regularly sustained.' This Brotherhood was entered by 138 cities, and by counts, knights and bishops innumerable, but by few Baptists. A branch was organized at Waldshut, which city Muller entered with 1,200 peasants; but when the persecuted Baptists there were charged with heresy and sedition, they uniformly denied the second charge, although they delighted in the doctrinal heresy charged upon them. Jacob Gross, a disciple of Hubmeyer, fled from Waldshut rather than bear arms. When Bruppacher was examined on the rack at Zurich, he said 'that he had never heard his brethren teach that there should be no magistracy; or that in case they should be successful they would overthrow the State.' And they uniformly denied that they had any thing to do with sedition, while doctrine and not sedition was the burden of their oral discussions and literature.

Happily, in modern times, the calumny that the Baptists were responsible for the horrors of Münster has lost its edge and the truth has found its way to the surface. Brandt attributes them to 'some enthusiastical Anabaptists,' but is careful to add: 'Not to the well-meaning Baptists.' Schaff pronounces it 'The greatest injustice to make the Anabaptists, as such, responsible for the extravagances that led to the tragedy of Münster.' Uhlhorn says that 'Sedition, or a call to sedition, is not chargeable against the Anabaptists of Southern Germany at this time; I have found no trace of any fellowship with the seditious peasants.'

[…]

The Münster men never had such dreams, raptures, apparitions, phantasms and ecstasies as the canonized saints of Rome. Neither did Luther help the lunatics to sounder doctrine when he saw the devil in the 'form of a dog,' 'a whisp of straw,' a wild boar and 'a star;' nor when he threw the inkstand at his head. As to violence: Catholics and Protestants taught them that tradition, reason and Scripture made it the pious duty of saints to torture and burn men as heretics out of pure love for their holiness and salvation. Protestants told them that it was sacred duty to slaughter those as schismatics, sectaries, malignants who corrupted the Church and would not live in peace with the Reformed. Who educated these fanatics in Christian love and gentleness? The law of their times was to repel force with force.

When the Münster men came into power they applied the reasoning of their tutors in atrocity, saying: 'Our bounden duty is now to rid the earth of Christ's enemies and ours, as they would rid it of us.' And who will say that all these murderers did not stand on the same plane of outrage and barbarity in this respect? As to immoralities: Every pure mind shrinks from the abhorrent indecencies of Münster. And who had set them this example? They practiced polygamy; but ten long years before this, 1524, Luther had written: 'The husband must be certified in his own conscience and by the word of God that polygamy is permitted to him. As for me, I avow that I cannot set myself in opposition to men marrying several wives, or assert that such a course is repugnant to the Holy Scripture.'

About the same time he preached his famous sermon on 'Marriage,' which chastity may well pass in silence, beyond this one expression: 'Provided one has faith, adultery is no sin.' It was not the madmen of Münster but Martin Luther who said: 'Whatever is allowed in the law of Moses as to marriage is not forbidden by the Gospel.' His course in the shameful affair of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, shows that although he did not wish to see 'this practice (polygamy) introduced among Christians,' yet he held to his old views. Hence, in 1539, four years after the Münster abomination, Philip told him, with what Michelet calls 'a daring frankness,' that he must marry another wife or continue his adulteries, saying: 'I have read with great attention the Old and New Testaments, and I can discover no other resource save that of taking another wife; for I neither can nor will change my course of life; I call God to witness my words.'

Yet with that unblushing brow before him, Luther, with Melanchthon, Bucer and four others, signed and sealed a document, attempting to dissuade the Landgrave, but failing of that, closed by saying: 'If, however, your Highness is utterly determined upon marrying a second wife, we are of opinion that it ought to be done secretly.' Antony Corvinus, the fourth signer of this reply to Philip, gives an account of the examination of John of Leyden, at which he was present, in which John gave his seven articles of faith. He intrenched himself behind Luther's position, saying that they followed 'the example of the patriarchs,' declared marriage a 'political institution,' and then put in the same plea as Philip. In Philip's letter to the Wittenberg divines he said: 'Ever since my marriage I have lived constantly in a state of adultery and fornication, and as I will not forego this course of life I am interdicted from taking the holy communion; for St. Paul expressly says, 'The adulterer shall not see the kingdom of heaven.' John of Leyden adopted this plea, saying, in his seventh article: 'It is better to have a plurality of wives than a multitude of prostitutes. God be our judge.'

Henry, the Duke of Brunswick, berated Luther for his approval of Philip's bigamy; when Luther replied, with his usual mildness, in his famous article, Against the Buffoon: 'The duke has daily swallowed devils, and he is chained in hell with the chains of divine judgment.' He then exhorts the pastors to denounce the duke from the pulpit as one who 'has been damned by divine judgment.' But when he revised his pamphlet, he said to Melancthon that he had been altogether too moderate. And what better examples had the Catholics set the Münster men in the line of purity? From the ninth century down, as Bowden says, in his Life of Hildebrand: 'The infamies prevalent among the clergy are to be alluded to, not detailed. The open licentiousness of the popes was appalling. The popes of the fifteenth century were profligate and debased beyond belief.'

[…]

Motley calls the Münster men 'furious fanatics, who deserved the mad-house rather than the scaffold;' and how much better were Catholics or Protestants, in practicing the same things! It is hardly worth while sending the Münster fiends to perdition alone, nolens volens, for unbearable beastliness. There was this difference between their butchery and the legal murders of Protestant and Catholic, called martyrdoms, namely: that theirs were acts of violence perpetrated in a religious craze or frenzy, while the others were the result of deliberate legislation, put on the statute-book, in that icy sublimity which dresses itself in the guise of human and divine law. But history will mete out to all these parties that tardy justice which will be honestly accepted by all in due time.

3. John Bunyan: Prisoner, Preacher, and the Question of Infant Baptism

Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Chapter IV, “British Baptists—John Bunyan” (about pp. 475–510). Abridged; omissions marked […]. English text from uncollated OCR; paragraph divisions supplied by CTS. The interpretations are the author’s.

CTS note: John Bunyan (1628–1688), author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was a member and later pastor of the Bedford congregation gathered by John Gifford, an open-membership church that received both those baptized as believers and those baptized as infants. Historians still debate whether Bunyan should be called a Baptist. Much of this chapter answers John Brown, Bunyan’s biographer and a later pastor at Bedford, who read a 1672 entry in the register of St. Cuthbert’s parish as the christening of Bunyan’s son Joseph; Armitage argues that it refers to his grandson. The question is still open. His harsh words about the Church of England clergy reflect the bitter conflicts of the Restoration period. Bunyan’s teaching on the place of wives reflects seventeenth-century views of marriage; Christians today read the biblical texts in different ways. The OCR loses or garbles several pages, marked [illegible]; long sections on registration law, the Bunyan family tree and the Prayer-book service have been omitted.

Chapter IV. British Baptists—John Bunyan

We must now look at the Baptists after the Restoration, the most noted of whom is John Bunyan. He was born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the famous year in which Charles I was forced to yield the Petition of Right. His education was next to nothing, yet he was favored above the boys of his village, for he attended the grammar school founded by Sir William Harper at Bedford; how long is not known, but at the best his educational attainments were quite scanty. Nature had given him a warm, light, frolicsome heart, which held him ready for any sort of glee and mischief, and under reversed circumstances subjected him not only to the pensive, but the desponding. He early feared God and longed to love him, but his giddiness and love of fun drew him into sin, until he became addicted to wrong-doing, principally lying and swearing.

Because his father and himself were tinkers, and Gipsies in England have been tinkers from time immemorial, he was long supposed to be of this alien blood. But the records of his family are now traceable to about A. D. 1200, and the name itself, as then known, Buignon, indicates that the family was of Norman origin. This great descendant of that house was a man of intense feeling on all subjects. The religion of his times was of the most earnest nature, emotional, deep, almost fanatical, and when Bunyan's heart began to yearn after the Lord Jesus, his whole nature was inflamed. If we should take his own version of his case literally, he would compel us to believe that he was a sad scamp in youth and a desperate villain in early manhood. He tells us, however, that he was never drunk nor unchaste, and certainly he was never a thief nor a highwayman. He broke the Sabbath, loved dancing, [illegible]

[…]

The great singers of his day were Herbert and Milton, Dryden and Shakespeare. And the mighty preachers were Howe and Henry, Charnock and Owen, Tillotson and South, Sherlock and Stillingfleet. Bunyan's observation was keen and extensive; he lived in the very heart of England, was an actor in some of its most exciting scenes, and it is impossible but that the spirit of the times moved him at every step. In his day, English literature had become thoroughly imbued with all the elements of poetry and fiction; nay, even of romance. These had come down through high Italian authorship. Not only had the colloquial English descended through Wyckliff, and its higher literature through Chaucer, but they had been largely blended in the Bible, with which Bunyan was most familiar; so that simple idiomatic Saxon English was prepared to his hand; being full of image and awe, of wonder and grandeur, which he could express to the popular mind in a very racy style.

Unconsciously he felt the force of his mother-tongue; it stimulated his genius, became the groundwork of his thought and the model of his utterance; a choice which places him side by side with Shakespeare and the English Bible, as one of the great conservators of our powerful language. In a burst of unreasoning loyalty the English people, in [illegible], placed Charles II on the throne, without exacting proper guarantees for that liberty which they had bought with their own blood. He had given his word on honor to protect all his subjects in their religious freedom; and then, like a true Stuart, he sold that honor to his lust of power. Hardly was he seated on the throne when Venner's petty insurrection furnished a pretext for vengeance upon all his opponents, and especially those in the dissenting sects, no matter how much they proved their loyalty. Amongst the first victims of his tyranny we find Bunyan, charged with 'devilishly and perniciously abstaining from going to church,' 'as a common upholder of meetings contrary to the laws of the king,' and with 'teaching men to worship contrary to law.'

He was sentenced to Bedford jail for three months, and at the end of that time to be transported if he refused to conform. But his judges kept him in prison for six years: and when released he instantly began to preach again, whereupon he was imprisoned for another six years. Being released still again, he began to preach at once, and was arrested for the third time, but was detained only a few months. His judges were harsh with him, but his real oppressors for these twelve weary years were the king and Parliament, who made it a crime for any one to preach but a priest of the Church of England. It was long supposed that he was imprisoned mostly in the town jail of Bedford, on the bridge over the river Ouse, but it is now clear that his long imprisonment was in the county jail, where [illegible] the anonymous biographer of 1700 says, that he heard him preach to sixty dissenters and three ministers. There is good ground for believing, however, that he passes [illegible]

[illegible] of life, from old age to childhood, have made it next to the Bible, the story of their lives. In all souls it has created visions, interpreted dreams, and awakened the joy that made me write.' The eight editions through which it passed in thirty years gave but small promise of the progress of its pilgrimage since. No book has been rendered into so many languages, except the word of God itself. To many who are now 'high in bliss upon the hills of God,' it first set the joy-bells ringing in the city of habitation. The pauper and beggar of London have read it in thorough-fares and squares, and threaded their way by its guidance through Vanity Fair. The Italian has crouched beneath the shade of the Vatican, and trembled to look up lest he should see Giant Pope. The dusky Burman has taken it into the deep jungle, to show him stepping-stones through the Slough of Despond. The darker African has stolen with it into a by-path of the wild woods, and, under the palm-tree, has dreamed of the white man's Heaven.

The son of Abraham and the daughter of Jerusalem have read its pages to the sigh of the wind amongst the olives and the ripple of Kedron; and the Hindoo, with Bunyan in his hand, has resolved on courage when he crossed the 'deep river;' for angels, such as do not wait upon the banks of his sacred Ganges, beckon him over. No wonder that when Mr. Brown, the minister of Bunyan's meeting, lately visited Scotland, a worthy Highlander was startled when introduced to him as 'Bunyan's successor.' Starting back and measuring him from head to foot, he exclaimed: 'Eh, mon! but ye'll ha' hard work to fill his shoon!' Dean Stanley says: 'When in early life I lighted on the passage where the Pilgrim is taken into the House Beautiful to see 'the pedigree of the Ancient of Days, and the varieties and histories of that place, both ancient and modern,' I determined that if ever the time should arrive when I should become a professor of ecclesiastical history, these should become the opening words in which I would describe the treasures of that magnificent store-house.

Accordingly, when, many years after, it so fell out, I could find no better mode of beginning my course at Oxford than by redeeming that early pledge; and when the course came to an end, and I wished to draw a picture of the prospects still reserved for the future of Christendom, I found again that the best words I could supply were those in which, on leaving the Beautiful House, Christian was shown in the distance the view of the Delectable Mountains, "which, they said, would add to his comfort because they were nearer to the desired haven."' This was a worthy and heart-felt tribute from Westminster to the dreaming tinker whose effigy now adorns the House of Commons, side by side with those of orators, heroes and statesmen in honor of the man, who, though he 'devilishly abstained from attending the church contrary to the laws of the king,' has preached in all pulpits and palaces ever since. After Bunyan's final release in 1672, he became pastor of the Church at Bedford, and so threw his life into Gospel labor, that his fame as a preacher increased until he was, perhaps, the most famous minister of his day. The few sermons [illegible]

[illegible] Matthew Hale, Chester and Twisden. With all the simplicity of a woman's love she told her artless story. She said that her husband was 'a peaceable person,' and wished to support his family. They had four helpless children, one of them blind, and while he was in prison they must live on charity. Hale treated her kindly, Twisden harshly, and demanded whether he would leave off preaching if released. In child-like honesty she replied, that he dare not leave off preaching 'so long as he could speak.' Her request was denied and she left the Court in tears, 'not so much,' she said, 'because they were so hard-hearted against me and my husband, but to think what a sad account such poor creatures would have to give at the coming of the Lord.' Jesus wept because Jerusalem stoned the prophets, and Bunyan's wife was much like him.

But, this giant in genius was just as tender-hearted as his wife. Where do we find such pathos in any passage as this, which he wrote in prison: 'The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling off my flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am too, too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the hardships, miseries and wants my poor family was like to meet with should I be taken from them; especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee.

But yet, thought I, I must venture all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you. I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and children. Yet, thought I, I must do it, I must do it.' So loving was Bunyan's disposition, that he kept the heart of the jailer soft all the time. He not only allowed him to visit his church frequently, unattended, and to preach the Gospel, too; but his blind Mary constantly visited him, with such little gifts as she could gather for his solace. She had great concern for him, lest he sorrowed beyond all hope, and often when parting with him, would put her delicate fingers to his eyes and cheeks, to feel if the tears flowed that she might kiss them away.

His blind babe died and left him in prison; with O, how many fatherly benedictions upon her sweet memory. It was meet that little, blind Mary Bunyan should enter the Celestial Gate before the hero of the 'den,' a true 'shining one,' to watch and wait for his coming. Nor did she wait long. In 1688 he went to London to reconcile an alienated father and son, and succeeded. But on the journey a violent storm overtook him, and he contracted a fatal illness which after ten days took him to Jesus, the King in his beauty and to blind Mary, when he first saw her sweet eyes blaze with light. She raised not a hand to his cheek then, as was her old wont in Bedford, for God had wiped away all tears from his eyes; and since then the old and young pilgrim have dwelt together in the golden city. Bunyan died just as the day dawned on England when the second great Revolution was to make her a free nation, in which Baptists could breathe freely. Mr. Froude couples him thus with them, in his biography of Bunyan: 'In the language of the time, he became convinced of sin and joined the Baptists, the most thorough- [illegible]

[illegible] '. . . acts of disobedience do we indulge them in? In the sin of infant baptism? We indulge them not, but being commanded to bear with the infirmities of the weak, suffer it; it being in our eyes such, but in theirs, they say, a duty, till God persuade them.' It matters not at this point whether, when Bunyan went with Gifford into the river Ouse, he was immersed or not, though Mr. Brown, judging by what Bunyan writes, 'though I go under that name myself' ('Anabaptist'), says, 'I should say he was immersed.' This much, however, is clear, that whatever was done to Bunyan in the Ouse, he did there publicly repudiate his own infant baptism. Mr. Brown tells us (page 36) that he finds John Bunyan's name in the list of nineteen christenings at Elstow Church in the following form: '1628, John the sonne of Thomas Bonnionn, Junr, the 30th of November.'

But as Bunyan could not go under the name of Anabaptist on that christening, it follows that when he went with Gifford into the river he deliberately repudiated the infant baptism which his father had imposed upon him in 1628, in the discharge of what he regarded as his parental 'duty,' as a member of the Church of England. It remains to be seen whether or not, a year after this repudiation, he fell into what he calls the weakness of infant baptism, and which he said was such in his eyes, by taking his own daughter to that same Church of England to christen her, in 'duty, till God persuaded' him otherwise. This, of course, would imply that he recalled his protest against his own infant baptism made a year earlier, and in turn repudiated his believers baptism, after he had solemnly taken it upon himself as an 'Anabaptist.'

This conduct would show any thing but that he had no strong feeling on the question of baptism, for with his very tender conscience he must have had terrible feelings on the subject, if he backed and filled in that way. No; this entry evinces the deepest feeling on the question of infant baptism and is his second public protest against its practice, the first being in himself by his own baptism as a believer, the second in his beloved daughter and her simple birth record. The difference between these two entries, the baptismal record of Mary and the birth record of Elizabeth, shows that between the years 1650 and 1654 a well defined change had taken place in their father's mind on the subject of christening. Had he chosen he could have had Elizabeth christened and her christening entered in the same form as that of Mary, but he chose not to do that; and limiting the record to her birth, it simply says that Elizabeth was 'borne' on the 14th day of April, 1654.

The following facts throw a flood of light upon this record, as they prove, that in 1645 Parliament put the recording of births into the hands of the clergy, that in 1653 this registration was taken out of their hands, and that under William and Mary it was restored to them again, and all this for the best of reasons. 1. In 1645 Parliament had banished the use of the Prayer-book in every place of worship in England and Wales, and had substituted a form of worship called the Directory. This law required all Prayer-books to be given up, and fined any who used one in any place of worship, church or chapel, £5 for the first offense, £10 for the second, and for the third offense one whole year's imprisonment without bail or mainprise.' It had also enacted, that 'There shall be provided at the charge of every parish or chapelry in the realm of England and dominion of Wales, a fair register book of vellum, to be kept by the minister and officers of the church, and that the names of all children baptized, and of their parents, and of the time of their birth and baptizing, shall be written and set down by the minister therein.'

This act provided for the registration of both births and baptisms, and was careful not to confound the two as one. 2. Down to A. D. 1653, the year in which Bunyan united with Gifford's Church, Quakers, Baptists and all who rejected infant baptism, were subjected to every sort of annoyance for neglecting to go to the recording clergy as thus required, to have their children christened and a record of their birth and baptism made in the 'book of vellum' at the parish church, the Church of England. The same was true also of their marriages and burials. 3. Having in view their relief, not only in the matter of baptism, but also in that of marriages and burials, Cromwell's short Parliament took this whole matter out of the hands of the clergy, making marriage a purely secular act, stripping birth, marriage and burial of subjection to all ecclesiastical usages, and put the entire keeping of the parish records into secular hands for civil purposes alone.

Of course, Baptists, Quakers and all other such subjects loyal to the civil power were delighted to be freed from ecclesiastical contempt in this way, and to comply with a mere civil provision, which in noway conflicted with their convictions of right; and they cheerfully complied with a law which simply required them to record the birth of their children as in duty to the State. 4. It is of this Act that Cobbet speaks in his 'Parliamentary History,' under date of August 25th, 1653. He writes: 'Great part of this month had been taken up in canvassing a bill concerning marriages and the registering thereof, and also of births and burials. This day it passed the house on this question, and was ordered to be printed and published. This extraordinary Act entirely took marriages out of the hands of the clergy, and put them into those of the Justices of the Peace.'

[…]

Of course, it aroused the wrath of the State clergy to the hottest indignation. They treated it with every form of contempt which they could devise. When the Directory had pushed the Prayer-book out of use, many hundreds of them, some say thousands, either resigned their livings or were ejected for setting the law at defiance. It absolutely forbade them to use the Prayer-book for the burial of the dead, as well as in their churches. It enjoined that, 'When any person departed this life, let the dead body upon the day of burial be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for public burial, and then interred without any ceremony. . . . For that praying, reading and singing, both in going to and at the grave, have been grossly abused, and are no more beneficial to the dead and have proved hurtful to the living; therefore, let all such things be laid aside.'

Surely, this was all that the clerical flesh and blood of that day could bear. But now, to follow up that revolution with another, which eight years later not only took marriage entirely out of their hands, but denied them the right to record the births which honored those secular marriages, was unendurable to them. If any body wanted them to christen their infants, the law did not forbid their doing so, in the exercise of their religious rights. But the law would not have their christenings entered on the public records as acts of any civil interest or concern. Then, the way in which their former prerogatives were taken from them, was more exasperating still. The new Registrars were to be selected by the popular vote of their own parishioners, over whom they had so unconscionably domineered, and that without regard to the religion of either candidate or voter.

Besides, the record of the marriages entered was to be purely secular and to be attested before a Justice of the Peace and not by a priest. And, worse than all, in the eyes of the priest, this Act of August 25th, 1653, left all who rejected the superstition of christening at liberty to enjoy the full rights of Englishmen by recording the birth of their children, and of securing to them all the legal advantages which such a civil entry secured in property rights and courts of justice, without compromising their principles by a forced submission to infant baptism. Their children could now prove their lineage and derive all the political rights which such entry entitled them to while they lived, and when they died they could be buried decently in ground either 'consecrated' or unconsecrated without anyhow consulting the whimsical dictations of an arrogant priesthood.

Such a state of things would suit Bunyan's ideas of liberty exactly. Such a right had never been enjoyed by dissenting Englishmen before, and Cobbet well characterizes the Act as 'extraordinary.' Its passage was stubbornly resisted as a bold innovation; and he says that it held Parliament to discussion for a great part of the entire month, which canvassing must have stirred the feelings of the entire realm. Especially must all Baptists and Quakers have been interested, as it took their marriages and burials out of the hands of an oppressive and offensive clergy, and left them at liberty to record the 'birth' of their children and to stop there, as far as christening was concerned; so that they now stood before the law on equality with their neighbors, free from all ecclesiastical proscription because they refused to have their children baptized. With this legal shield thrown over head, we can easily understand why honest John Bunyan, who spoke so freely in his writings against infant baptism, as we shall see, felt it his duty as an English freeman to obey the law by entering the birth of his babe on the public record, when English law at last stepped forth sacredly to guard the rights of his conscience while discharging his duty as a citizen.

Thus the entry of his child's birth without any entry of her christening stands to the end of time on the Elstow parish Register with the force of his public protest against the superstition of infant baptism enforced by the State. Then was Elizabeth Bunyan christened as matter of fact? Certainly not. Mr. Brown quotes the entry in the Elstow parish Register and concedes that it certifies only to her birth. He also refers to the law of 1653 in the following words: 'It will be pointed out, perhaps, that the register notes that Elizabeth Bunyan was 'borne' on the [illegible] day of April, and says nothing about her baptism. But it will be remembered that the previous year an Act of Parliament had been passed requiring the date of birth to be inserted in the register instead of that of baptism.' [illegible] The discrepancy referred to by Mr. Copner (whose own valuable work on Bunyan is elsewhere cited in these pages) is simply that of the use of 'borne' in the original and 'christened' in the transcript.

Otherwise it appears that the documents correspond. The investigation reduces itself to the inquiry, which shall be believed, the original register which says that Elizabeth was born on April 14th, 1654, or the transcript which states that she was christened on that day? It is to the last degree improbable that she was both born and christened on the same day, and therefore both records cannot be true. Born in her father's house on the 14th of April, even if he had wished her christened, she could not be taken to the parish church on the day of her birth. But if she was christened on the 14th of April and born at some other time, then the original entry is made a piece of confusion. It was never the custom of the English, or even of the Romish Church, to christen children on the very day of their birth, unless it was feared that the child would die immediately after coming into the world, and so its body was sprinkled to save its soul.

Furthermore, it is not claimed that these transcript registers were independent records of facts outside of those contained in the originals. The transcripts were annual copies of the Parish Register sent up on parchment to the Archdeacon by the vicar or rector of the parish in compliance with the canons of 1603. They gave the names of all persons married, baptized, or buried the previous year copied from the Register, and forwarded each Easter. This was to provide for the existence of a duplicate copy in case the parish register should be lost. The transcripts, therefore, always purported to be exact copies of the originals and, in case of discrepancy, the originals would of course govern. We are thus brought to the question, which is entitled to credence: a public record kept and prepared under direction of the law of the land, with prescribed formalities by a duly elected civil officer, or the inconsistent statement contained in an extra-official document, without date or signature, which purports to be a copy of the original and is not a true copy thereof?

Here again the mere statement of the proposition makes only one answer possible. It is a trite rule of the law that, for the purpose of evidence, a copy is not allowable in the presence of the original, and it is not easy to see why Mr. Brown should have brought in a professed copy with the original, especially as the original says one thing and the so-called copy another. In a letter dated May 21st, 1886, he says: 'This Transcript for 1654 is at Bedford in the Archives of the Archdeanery along with those from all the parishes of Bedfordshire. Those for the Commonwealth Period were sent up for the whole ten years at once [1650-1660] after the Restoration by the vicar, Christopher Hall, and are complete.' It is difficult to imagine any motive for the continuation of the custom of sending an annual transcript during the Commonwealth.

[…]

Why had he been in prison for nearly thirteen years? Let him answer that question himself: 'I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the Church of England. There was a bill of indictment preferred against me. The extent thereof was as followeth: "That John Bunyan of the town of Bedford, laborer, being a person of such and such conditions, he hath (since such a time) devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the king."' Queen Elizabeth had passed a sanguinary Act 'For the punishment of persons refusing to come to church.' It provided, that 'Any person above sixteen years of age who refused to attend the reading of Common prayer in some church, should be first imprisoned, then if he refused to sign a declaration of conformity within three months he should be banished, and if he returned to England he should suffer death without benefit of clergy.'

It was under this brutal Act that Bunyan was charged with 'devilishly abstaining from coming to church.' Besides, shortly after he was put in prison, the Act of Conformity (1662) made the Prayer-book the national standard of faith, enforced by the penal laws of all preceding reigns. But why did he stay away from church, after telling us that when a boy he almost worshiped the parson and his vestments and the Prayer-book, looking upon them all with the most holy awe? Because he had become convinced that the clergy were corrupt and he now looked upon them with supreme contempt. In his 'Justification by Faith,' signed 'John Bunyan, From Prison, the 27th of the 12th month, [illegible],' he says to Fowler, a clergyman of the Church of England, who had vilified him: 'What you say about "doubtful opinion, alterable modes, rites, and circumstances in religion" (p. 230), I know none so wedded thereto as yourselves, even the whole gang of your rabbling counterfeit clergy; who generally, like the ape you speak of, lie blowing up the applause and glory of your trumpery.'

Yet, now we are asked to believe that within a year of writing this blast against the clergy, he went to this 'counterfeit, rabbling gang' to get his baby christened! And why would he not listen to the Prayer-book? 'It is none of God's institution,' he said. His contempt for the Prayer-book lay at the bottom of all his sufferings. When Judge Keeling, in a towering passion, at his trial, asked why he stayed away from church, he calmly answered: 'The word of God does not command me to pray by the Common Prayer-book.' Keeling learnedly told him that this book had come down from the Apostles! This, the Bedford 'laborer' ventured to doubt, saying: 'Show me the place in the Epistles where the Common Prayer-book is written, or one text in Scripture that commands me to read it and I will read it.'

[…]

These words were first published in 1678, six years after this alleged christening of Joseph. But in 1673, only one year after this alleged christening, when Kiffin, already quoted in part, asked him why he indulged 'the Baptists' (that is, the members of the Bedford Church) 'in many acts of disobedience? For to come unprepared into the church is an act of disobedience; to come unprepared to the Supper is an act of disobedience.' Bunyan resented the charge with great spirit, demanding: 'But what acts of disobedience do we indulge them in? In the sin of infant baptism? We indulge them not; but being commanded to bear with the infirmities of each other, suffer it; it being indeed in our eyes such; but in theirs they say a duty, till God shall otherwise persuade them.'

On the same page he says, that he cannot 'press baptism in our notion, on those that cannot bear it.' Here, to say the least, he regards infant baptism as the infirmity of those who practiced it, which he could 'suffer' 'till God shall otherwise persuade them.' If Bunyan had had no such scruples on infant baptism as are here stated, if he had a babe born to him in 1672 and he desired him christened, he could have done this himself as pastor of the Bedford Church, or any Pedobaptist dissenting minister in England would have cheerfully done it for him. But the supreme absurdity of sending him off to the National Church to have this done, bears its contradiction on its face. What must he have done in such a case purely as a matter-of-fact in order to meet the demands of the Rubric itself? This certainly it required: 'There shall be for every male-child to be baptized two godfathers and one godmother. . . .'

[…]

[illegible] These women were conscientiously connected with other Churches, and differing with their husbands in their religious views, they felt it incumbent on them, as mothers, to do what they esteemed a religious duty. Besides, the ministers to whom they took their children treated them and their households kindly. But whether Elizabeth Bunyan were a Baptist or not, she was not likely to go to her husband's open persecutors, who had brought all her sorrows upon her head and had treated her husband like a brute and had left her children to starve, to seek their blessing upon a child whom they despised for his father's sake; indeed, she was not a woman of that stamp. She loved her husband too dearly to compromise him in that way. Besides, if the Joseph who was christened was her son, and she had him christened by stealth, on religious conviction, why was she not consistent with herself in doing the same for her daughter, Sarah, and in putting her christening on the same record, if Sarah was born in the same parish?

While she almost idolized her husband, he, in turn, almost idolized her. She believed in him and in his view of the Church of England. She pleaded for him before the bench of judges and went to London to pray for his liberty through Lord Barkwood and the House of Lords. And when Sir Matthew Hale pitied her, and asked of her husband's calling, a chorus of the other judges cried out: 'A tinker, my lord!' 'Yes,' said the poor and dauntless woman, 'and because he is a tinker and a poor man therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' One of the judges responded in great anger: 'My lord, he will preach and do what he lists.' His noble wife replied: 'He preacheth nothing but the word of God.' The angry judge cried out: 'His doctrine is the doctrine of the devil!' 'My lord,' the true Elizabeth replied, 'when the righteous Judge shall appear, it will be known that his doctrine is not the doctrine of the devil!'

Made of that sort of metal, would she yet smuggle her husband's son into the State Church against all his father's preaching, writing and suffering? Could she thus trifle with his religious principles and with her own oppressions in the bargain? Bunyan's teaching to her was that the wife must look upon her husband 'as her head and lord. The head of the woman is the man. . . . It is an unseemly thing so much as once in all her life-time to offer to overstep her husband; she ought in every thing to be in subjection to him, and to do all that she doeth, as having her warrant, license and authority from him. . . . The wife is master next her husband, and is to rule all in his absence; yea, in his presence she is to guide the house, to bring up the children; provided, she so do it as the adversary have no occasion to speak reproachfully. . . .

Therefore, act and do still; as being under the power of the husband.' The fact is, according to his biographer of 1700: 'In his family he kept up a very strict discipline, in prayer and exhortations.' Hence, there is not the slightest probability that Elizabeth took her child to St. Cuthbert's to be christened, nor is the intimation that she did at all to the honor of her name.

[…]

As to the lease given by the Corporation of Bedford to John Bunyan, Jr., in 1705, that had better not be mentioned in an honest attempt to determine where he lived in 1672, seventeen years before the lease was given. Taking every thing into the account connected with his special and personal household, we have simply this chain of circumstances: He bequeathed his house in St. Cuthbert's parish to his granddaughter in 1728, in which house his father had lived from 1681 to 1688; it is more in keeping with the natural order of things to infer that it was his name which appeared on the Tax-list of that parish from 1670 to 1674, rather than the name of his father who was in prison till 1672. And, taking all things into consideration on the Senior Bunyan's side of the house, his imprisonment from 1661 to 1671, his abject poverty during those years, the partial dependence of his family on friends for their bread, and the absolute absence of proof as to where they lived while he was in prison; all reasonable conjecture points to the supposition that the Joseph of the baptismal register of 1672 was the son of John Bunyan, Jr. and the grandson of John Bunyan, Sr. The name in the record still stands 'John,' but it must be proven that the John was responsible for its creation, before men of sound judgment can be convinced that it is the record of his Conformity to what he branded as an 'Anti-Christian' body.

4. Roger Williams and Soul Liberty in Rhode Island

Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Chapter III, “Settlement of Rhode Island” (about pp. 641–658). Abridged; omissions marked […]. English text from uncollated OCR; paragraph divisions supplied by CTS. The interpretations are the author’s.

CTS note: Roger Williams (about 1603–1683) founded Providence in 1636 after his banishment from Massachusetts Bay. In 1639 he helped form the first Baptist church in America, but within months he left it and lived the rest of his life as a “Seeker.” Armitage’s admiring portrait is widely shared, though historians add that the banishment also involved disputes over the colony’s charter and Indian land titles, and that Rhode Island did not always live up to its principles. The clause excluding Roman Catholics, which Armitage treats as a later interpolation, appeared in the eighteenth-century law collections and was repealed in 1783; when it was first added is still discussed. The “Popish Plot” of 1678 was alleged against Charles II, not William III as the text says. His descriptions of Native Americans use the language of his day. Passages on Williams’s remains, a long quotation about his writings, a case of domestic violence and the naturalization case of 1762 have been omitted.

Chapter III. Settlement of Rhode Island

Salem was filled with excitement and grief when Williams was banished, and asked what its good pastor had done to merit this cruelty at the hands of his fellow-disciples in Christ? John Cotton, snugly housed in his Boston home, severely descanted on Williams's exile as any thing but 'banishment.' In that dreary New England winter, as his brother plunged into the depths of the forests, he spoke of it as a large and fruitful 'land, in which he enjoyed ample enlargement.' But Cotton was careful not to break the command by coveting that 'enlargement' for himself, nor did he so hanker after the delicious fruits of the wilderness as to follow his brother, to rejoice with him in his tribulation. Indeed, he queries whether it was 'a punishment at all,' and one would rather catch the impression from his showing, that the Court had simply sent him on a restful excursion, in absolute dereliction of its duty to punish crime.

The illustrious hero himself thought that Cotton might have seen the matter in another light, 'had his soul been in my soul's case, exposed to the miseries, poverties, necessities, debts and hardships,' which he endured. The weak people of Salem also wept as if their hearts would break, that he was driven they knew not where, 'for they were much taken with the apprehension of his godliness.' Neal says, that the whole town was in an uproar, that they raised the 'cry of persecution,' and 'that he would have carried off the greater part of the inhabitants of the town, if the ministers of Boston had not interfered.' These admonished the Church at Salem for sympathizing with one who had been driven out of civilization as a felon. Upham, the careful historian of the Salem Church, says: 'They adhered to him long and faithfully, and sheltered him from all assaults.

And when at last he was sentenced by the General Court to banishment from the colony on account of his principles, we cannot but admire the fidelity of that friendship which prompted many of his congregation to accompany him in his exile, and partake of his fortunes when an outcast upon the earth.' Thanks to Salem, its loss was the world's gain. That day, out of the weak came forth strength, and out of the bitter came forth sweetness. Good old Puritan city of witchcraft and halters, out of thee, as from [illegible] of old, went forth an illustrious exile: the first to redeem the souls of men, and the other to give fifty millions of them soul liberty. Men intended only evil in both cases, but God overruled their aims for good. His eye rested on this wanderer in the New World, and his voice told him what to do and where to go.

We now follow Roger Williams into those wild tracts of nature where the wolf, the bear and the panther roamed in all their voracity. Perpetual hardships had given the wild tribes of that region compact and well-knit bodies, which could subsist for days on a handful of corn. Aside from this, with their fish and game, they had little food in the depth of winter, knowing nothing of salted meats, and often they were sorely pinched with hunger. So far as appears, Williams entered the desert without a weapon, bow or arrow, spear or club, hatchet or gun, to hunt for bird or beast, and every esculent root was frozen in the ground and buried in the snow. That winter was signally bitter and he felt its keen severity. It seems to have haunted his mind in 1652, when he dedicated his 'Hireling Ministry' to Charles II., in the epistle to which, he calls New England a 'miserable, cold, howling wilderness.' Without bread or bed for fourteen weeks, and the first white man who had ever wandered in those mazes, he regarded himself cared for of God as miraculously as was Elijah, and he sang this song in his desolate pilgrimage:

'God's Providence is rich to his, / Let none distrustful be; / In wilderness, in great distress, / These ravens have fed me.'

The bronzed barbarians through whose lands he passed were superstitious, ferocious and often treacherous. He would not have been safe for an hour, had not his kind acts toward them been noised through their tribes. While at Plymouth he had gone forth amongst them, had visited their wigwams, learned their language, preached to them the good news of the kingdom; and now his love governed the wild element in their bosoms when he had no power over fierce winter storms. He knew their chiefs or sachems, and on reaching their settlements on Narragansett Bay, his sufferings touched the savage heart. They remembered his former kindness, welcomed him to Indian hospitality, and Massasoit took him to his cabin as he would a brother. Here he bought a tract of land, pitched his tent, and with the opening spring began to plant and build on the east bank of the Seekonk River.

Immediately, however, he received a friendly letter from Winslow, Governor of Plymouth, advising him to cross the river and push farther into the wilderness, as he was too near the boundary line of that colony. Seeking and pursuing peace, he and his companions took a canoe, shot into the stream and made their way down to a little cove near India Point, when a company of Indians hailed them with a friendly salutation which they had caught from the English: 'What cheer?' There they tarried for a time, but kept on round the Point to the mouth of the Moshassuck River, where a delicious spring of water invited them to land. Casting around for a resting-place in the dense forest, where wild beasts and savages hemmed them in from their Christian brethren, and where they were far enough from persecuting Christians to give Christianity fair play, they stood on holy ground.

Under a bright June sky, with a soil around them which was unpolluted by the foot of oppression and a virgin fountain laughing at their feet, for the first time in life 'their bosoms swelled full free to worship God.' There he said of his harsh brethren: 'I had the country before me, and might be as free as themselves, and we should be loving neighbors together.' He built an altar there, and called the name of that place Providence; for he said, 'God has been merciful to me in my distress.' There he bought land of the Indians for the Providence plantations, and in June, 1636, laid the foundation-stone of the freest city and State on earth; a republic of true liberty, a perpetual memorial to the unseen Finger that pointed out the hallowed spot. To this day that virgin stream remains unmingled with a tear drawn from the eye by Christian cruelty, nor has religious despotism yet forced a drop of blood there from the veins of God's elect.

The first concern of its illustrious founder was, that this new home should be a shelter 'to persons distressed for conscience.' The compact drawn reads thus: 'We whose names are here underwritten, being desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to submit ourselves in active and passive obedience, to all such orders or agencies as shall be made for public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together into a township, and such others whom they shall admit into the same, only in civil things.' Here we find the first germ of that great modern doctrine which he afterward avowed in his 'Bloody Tenet' in these words: 'The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.' Also, this simple compact sweeps away at a stroke every allegation that he was banished for civil wrongs, and that the religious aspects of his case were an after-thought.

Those who make that allegation are bound by self-respect as well as historic justice to show on what [illegible] of human motive Williams, exiled for faction and sedition, should, in organizing a new government, first exact the bond that no man under that government should ever be 'molested for his conscience.' How do the antecedents of such alleged crime express themselves in such a sequence? No; here, as elsewhere, human nature was true to itself. That which had been cruelly denied in Massachusetts, for which he had suffered the loss of all things, should now be secured at all hazards. Each man reserved to himself the rights of conscience, which no number of the 'major' part might touch, and that at once was made an inalienable right; all else 'in civil things' could be risked as of minor consequence. We have already seen that from the Swiss Baptists of 1527, the Dutch Baptists, the 'Confession' of 1611 and others, this doctrine had gone forth to do its work and had been a cardinal principle with all Baptists.

Also, that William of Orange was the first of rulers in the old governments who embodied it in an existing constitution; but the honor was reserved for Roger Williams of making it the foundation-stone on which human government should stand; because conscience is the regnant power to which all obligation appeals in the individual man. This demanded from Bancroft, our great historian, that memorable utterance which has been sneered at as 'rhetoric,' by men who are unworthy to untie the latchet of his shoe, although as an honest chronicler he could not withhold this testimony concerning Roger Williams: 'He 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. . . . Williams would permit persecution of no opinion, no religion, leaving heresy unharmed by law, and orthodoxy unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes. . . .

We praise the man who first analyzed the air, or resolved water into its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds, even though the discoveries may have been as much the fruits of time as of genius. A moral principle has a much wider and nearer influence on human happiness; nor can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to society, than that which establishes a perpetual religious peace, and spreads tranquillity through every community and every bosom. If Copernicus is held in perpetual reverence, because, on his death-bed, he published to the world that the sun is the center of our system; if the name of Kepler is preserved in the annals of human excellence for his sagacity in detecting the laws of the planetary motions; if the genius of Newton has been almost adored for dissecting a ray of light and weighing heavenly bodies in a balance — let there be for the name of Roger Williams at least some humble place among those who have advanced moral science and made themselves the benefactors of mankind.'

In 1872 the Congress of the United States had placed a memorial of Roger Williams in the National Capitol, and Senator Anthony, January 9, delivered a eulogy of great justice and beauty, in which he paid the following tribute to the immortal defender of soul liberty: 'In all our history no name shines with a purer light than his whose memorial we have lately placed in the Capitol. In the history of all the world there is no more striking example of a man grasping a grand idea, at once, in its full proportions, in all its completeness, and carrying it out, unflinchingly, to its remotest legitimate results. Roger Williams did not merely lay the foundations of religious freedom; he constructed the whole edifice, in all its impregnable strength, and in all its imperishable beauty. Those who have followed him in the same spirit have not been able to add any thing to the grand and simple words in which he enunciated the principle, nor to surpass him in the exact fidelity with which he reduced it to the practical business of government.

Religious freedom, which now, by general consent, underlies the foundation principles of civilized government, was, at that time, looked upon as a wilder theory than any proposition, moral, political, or religious, that has since engaged the serious attention of mankind. It was regarded as impracticable, disorganizing, impious, and, if not utterly subversive of social order, it was not so only because its manifest absurdity would prevent any serious effort to enforce it. The lightest punishment deemed due to its confessor was to drive him out into the howling wilderness. Had he not met with more Christian treatment from the savage children of the forest than he had found from "the Lord's anointed," he would have perished in the beginning of his experiment. . . Such a man was Roger Williams. No thought of himself, no idea of recompense or of praise, interfered to sully the perfect purity of his motives, the perfect disinterestedness of his conduct.

Laboring for the highest benefit of his fellow-men, he was entirely indifferent to their praises. He knew (for God, whose prophet he was, revealed it to him) that the great principle for which he contended, and for which he suffered, founded in the eternal fitness of things, would endure forever. He did not inquire if his name would survive a generation. In his vision of the future, he saw mankind emancipated from the thralldom of priestcraft, from the blindness of bigotry, from the cruelties of intolerance. He saw the nations walking forth in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free.' Yet this statement expresses no more than the general conviction of the American public. Recently, a leading New York daily of weighty influence said: 'Baptists have solved a great problem. They combine the most resolute conviction, the most stubborn belief in their own special doctrines, with the most admirable tolerance of the faith of other Christians.

And this combination of sturdy faith with graceful tolerance makes it easy to recognize them as the followers of Roger Williams.' Indeed, the best thinkers in Europe begin to unite in this sentiment. Long since Gervinus, the profound German, said of Williams, that he founded 'a new society in Rhode Island upon the principles of entire liberty of conscience and the uncontrolled power of the majority in secular concerns, . . . which principles have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union, . . . and given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe.' Williams had the choice before him of direct hostility between the Church and State, as in the pagan days of early Christianity; an alliance between them, as in Constantine's day; a supremacy of the Church over the State, as in the Middle Ages: or entire independence of each other, earnest, friendly, helpful in the common weal.

Cavour wished for 'Free Churches in a free State,' having borrowed the ideal of Roger Williams. The first publicists of our age are the most ready to credit him and his coadjutors with linking liberty to law, and with proving that a voluntary religion is the determined foe of license on the one hand and of tyranny on the other, when they exercise their free life independently of each other. This point he set forth fully not only in its practical bearings, but he defined and defended it unmistakably in his works. When in London, in 1644, he published his 'Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience;' in 1647 John Cotton replied in his 'Bloody Tenet Washed and Made White;' and Williams rejoined in his 'Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody,' in 1652. Williams took the broad ground throughout that no man can be held responsible to his fellow-man for his religious belief.

Cotton attempted to take new ground, but failed, and was obliged to fall back upon the old Catholic view. He denied the right to persecute men for 'conscience rightly informed.' But if a man's conscience is 'erroneous and blind in fundamental and weighty matters,' then the magistrate may admonish him on the subject; and if he remains 'willfully blind and criminally obstinate,' then the magistrate may punish him. This makes the civil power the sole judge of fundamental error, willful blindness and cruel obstinacy, and covers all that the Catholic powers ever claimed on the subject. When the principles of Williams were distorted and he was charged with sustaining anarchy to the destruction of civil government, he wrote his immortal letter on the question, which has been denominated a 'classic,' and will scarcely perish for ages. Amongst other things he said: 'There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls on one ship, whose weal or woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society.

It hath fallen out sometimes that both Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges: that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews or Turks be forced to come to the ship's prayers or worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship if they practice any. I further add, that I never denied, that notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of this ship ought to command the ship's course, yea, and also command that justice, peace and sobriety be kept and practiced both among the seamen and all the passengers. If any of the seamen refuse to perform their service, or passengers to pay their freight; if any refuse to help, in person or purse, toward the common charges or defense; if any refuse to obey the common laws and order of the ship concerning their common peace or preservation; if any shall mutiny and rise up against their commanders and officers; if any should preach or write that there ought to be no commanders or officers because all are equal in Christ, therefore, no masters or officers, no laws or orders, no corrections or punishments; I say, I never denied, but in such cases, whatever is pretended, the commander or commanders may judge, resist, compel and punish such transgressors, according to their deserts and merits.

This, if seriously and honestly minded, may, if it please the Father of lights, let in some light to such as willingly shut not their eyes.' It would be interesting to trace the further history of his life and of Rhode Island in their defense and application of the liberty of conscience, but it must suffice to say, that during the rest of his days Williams remained its faithful exponent and defender. He had followed his convictions on that subject from the Episcopalians to the Congregationalists, from them to the Baptists, and from them to the Seekers. In these changes his personal religious character remained without a spot; he 'gave the same large liberty to all others which he took for himself,' he respected their motives and convictions, and in his controversies with them left no trace of acerbity. His personal services to all the New England colonies, by skillful negotiations with the Indians, which twice saved them from a general war that might have exterminated them, can hardly be overestimated.

Bancroft justly characterizes his exertions in breaking the Pequod league as 'a most intrepid and successful achievement, an action as perilous in its execution as it was fortunate in its issue.' The youthful reader will be grateful for a fuller detail of these facts, which is here attempted in brief. In the fall of 1636, only six months after the flight of Williams into the wilderness, he found that the Indian tribes were forming a league for the destruction of the English, and at once informed the Governor of Massachusetts of the plot in order to save them. Passion ran high on the part of that colony and on the part of the red men, and the Massachusetts government asked him to step in as mediator between them. This was the exile's prompt reply: 'The Lord helped me immediately to put my life into my hand, and, scarce acquainting my wife, to ship myself alone, in a poor canoe, and to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem's house.

Three days and nights my business forced me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequod ambassadors, whose hands and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also. God wondrously preserved me, and helped me to break to pieces the Pequods' negotiation and design; and to make and finish, by many travels and charges, the English league with the Narragansetts and Mohegans against the Pequods.' This resulted in a lasting treaty of peace, which was written in English, which language the Indians could not understand, and a copy was sent by Massachusetts to Williams, with the request that he would interpret it to them. Thus, the illustrious exile served and saved the country from whence he was banished, while his bones were yet aching with the hardships of his journey, in beautiful illustration of his Master's words, Luke vi, 22, 23, 27, 28.

With the artless simplicity of a child, he tells Winthrop of his interview with Canonicus, the great chief, in the interests of Massachusetts. He says of this warrior that he 'was very sour, and accused the English and myself for sending the plague amongst them, and threatening to kill me especially. Such tidings it seems were lately brought to his ears by some of his flatterers and our ill-willers. I discerned cause of bestirring myself and stayed the longer, and at last, through the mercy of the Most High, I not only sweetened his spirit, but possessed him, that the plague and other sicknesses were alone in the hand of the one God, who made him and us, who being displeased with the English for lying, stealing, idleness and uncleanness, the natives' epidemical sins, smote many thousands of us ourselves with general and late mortalities.'

And how did Massachusetts treat him, when he heaped these glowing coals of Christian love on her head? Let us see. He went to England to procure a charter, being obliged to take a ship from the Dutch settlement, and when he returned, in 1644, with the instrument which gave his people an independent government, in order that he might land in Boston, several nobles and Parliament men gave him a gracious letter commending him to the authorities of Massachusetts, but they treated him rudely and as still a banished man. Hubbard says, in their defense (p. 349), that 'They saw no reason to condemn themselves for any former proceedings against Mr. Williams; but for any offices of Christian love and duties of humanity they were willing to maintain a mutual correspondence with him. But as to his dangerous principles of separation, unless he can be brought to lay them down, they see no reason why to concede to him, or any so persuaded, free liberty of ingress and egress lest any of their people should be drawn away from his erroneous principles.'

Well may John Callender, 'that disciple whom Jesus loved,' say of him in his own manly manner: 'Mr. Williams appears, by the whole course and tenor of his life and conduct here, to have been one of the most disinterested men that ever lived, a most pious and heavenly-minded soul.' (Hist. Dis., p. 17.) And this judgment of his wisdom, magnanimity and goodness, is shared by the great everywhere. Southey called him the 'best and greatest of the Welshmen,' and Archbishop Whately, who venerated his memory as a great benefactor of mankind, paid him well-merited praise, for he never corrupted any man by pen or tongue, but devoted his long life to the blessing of his race. The exact date of his death is not known; it was early in 1683, when about eighty-four years of age, and he was buried with all the honors that the colony could show.

[…]

A monument, twenty-seven feet high, crowned by a statue seven and a half feet in height, was erected to his memory in 1877 in Roger Williams Park, Providence, but as a likeness of the great apostle it is purely ideal. Most sacredly has Rhode Island guarded the hallowed trust committed to her charge, for no man has ever been persecuted in that sovereignty for his religious opinions and practices from its first settlement in 1636. Williams obtained the first charter in 1643-44, and the first body of laws was drawn under it in 1647. Under the town legislation of the several towns, which had sprung up before the charter was granted, absolute religious liberty was secured to each inhabitant; in 1647, at the close of the civil enactments made under this charter, these words were added: 'And otherwise than this, what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God. And let the lambs of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation in the name of Jehovah their God forever.'

At the first, all the functions of government were exercised by the whole body of citizens in town-meeting. Two deputies were chosen to preserve the peace, call the meeting and execute its decisions. The same spirit animated the two colonies of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. In fact, the first declaration of democracy formulated in America dates from the island of Rhode Island, March 16, 1641, when 'It was ordered and unanimously agreed upon, that the government which this body politic doth attend unto in this island and the jurisdiction thereof, in favor of our prince, is a Democracy, or popular government; that is to say, it is in the power of the body of freemen, orderly assembled, or major part of them, to make or constitute just laws, by which they will be regulated, and to depute from among themselves such ministers as shall see them faithfully executed between man and man.' And the following acts secured religious liberty there: 'It was further ordered, by the authority of this present Court, that none be accounted a delinquent for doctrine, provided, it be not directly repugnant to the government or laws established.'

On September, 1641, it was ordered, 'That that law of the last Court, made concerning liberty of conscience in point of doctrine, be perpetuated.' It was decreed at Providence in 1647 that since 'our charter gives us power to govern ourselves, and such other as come among us, and by such a form of civil government as by the voluntary consent, etc., shall be found most suitable to our estate and condition; it is agreed by this present Assembly thus incorporate, and by this present act declared, that the form of government established in Providence Plantations is Democratical; that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all or the greater part of the free inhabitants.' At Providence, May, 1638, a citizen who had molested the rights of his wife's conscience by refusing to let her attend public worship, when she desired to do so, was disfranchised, in these words: 'Joshua Verin, for breach of covenant in restraining liberty of conscience, shall be withheld the liberty of voting, till he declare the contrary.'

[…]

In 1745 there was printed a revision or compilation of all the laws of the colony since its first charter, which was called the 'Revision of 1745.' This makes reference to a law said to have been passed in 1663-64 to the effect, that 'All men professing Christianity, and of competent estates and civil conversation (Roman Catholics only excepted), shall be admitted freemen, or may choose or be chosen colonial officers.' This alleged act is referred to by Chalmers, an English author, in his 'Political Annals,' London (1780). Judge Samuel Eddy, a man of great learning and scrupulous veracity, who was Secretary of State in Rhode Island from 1797 to 1819, and had all the records at command, says that he carefully investigated all the laws of the colony from the first Charter (1643-44) to 1719 and that 'there is not a word on record of the act referred to by Chalmers' and contained in the 'Revision of 1745' prior to that year.

This he shows conclusively: 1. By citing the First Charter, in which liberty is granted the colonists to make their own laws, and the consequent passage in 1647 of a body of colonial laws, providing that 'All men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God.' 2. He cites the Second Charter (1663), which provides that 'No person within said colony at any time hereafter shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion;' that they may 'freely and fully have and enjoy their own judgments and consciences in matters of religious concernments.' 3. He cites an expression of the Assembly, of May, 1665, that 'It hath been a principle held forth and maintained in this colony from the beginning thereof, so it is much in their hearts to procure the same liberty to all persons within this colony forever as to the worship of God therein.'

A military law, passed May, 1677, is to the same effect. 4. In 1680, the Assembly said: 'We leave every man to walk as God shall persuade their hearts and do actively and passively yield obedience to the civil magistrate.' Judge Eddy says: 'Thus you have positive and indubitable evidence that the law excluding Roman Catholics from the privileges of freemen was not passed in 1663-64, but that at that time and long after they were entitled to all the privileges of other citizens.' He adds, that 'the search was had with a particular view to this law excluding Roman Catholics from the privileges of freemen, and can find nothing that has any reference to it, nor any thing that gives any preference or privileges to men of one set of religious opinions over those of another till the Revision of 1745.' Roger Williams was a member of the Upper House, 1664, 1670-71, and of the Lower House in 1667, and died 1683.

Eddy says: 'That such a law could have been passed in the life-time of the first settlers is hardly credible,' and that the statement in the Revision of 1745 is plainly an error. It was twenty years after the appointment of the Committee on Revision that their report was printed, 1745, there being no printing-press in the colony till that year, and no newspaper till 1758. The existence of this law against Catholics in 1745 does not necessarily show that the law was passed at that time, but Eddy does show that it must have been enacted between 1719 and 1745, the Revision being the only record of the law. Exactly in what year it passed does not anywhere appear, but it existed as an unrepealed statute in 1745, amongst the laws then [illegible] officially printed by the colony, while Eddy proves that the date 1663-64 is plainly a mistake.

The universal reputation of Rhode Island in the neighboring colonies for the largest freedom in religion, is well sustained by these laws, which completely deny that any were persecuted therefor, much less Roman Catholics. Cotton Mather says, that there were no Roman Catholics in the colony in 1695, and Chalmers says the same of 1680. Seeing, then, that this anti-Catholic, parenthetic clause is not to be found in any manuscript law of the colony either before 1663-64, or after, and so long as no date can be fixed upon for its enactment, the fair presumption follows that it is an interpolation. This presumption is strengthened also by the additional facts, that although 'all men' had from the founding of the colony walked 'as their consciences persuade' them, yet, for twenty-seven years no Roman Catholic had come to the colony, or been notified that he could not come, nor has any Catholic ever been refused his full rights there to this day.

The law of May 10th, 1647, made express provision for the liberty of all to walk unmolested in the name of his God, and yet, according to Chalmers, it was thirty-three years after that enactment, namely, in 1680, before any Catholic availed himself of this freedom. So, then, there was nothing in 1663-64 to call for the legislative insertion of such a clause changing the law from what it had been since the founding of the colony. The general supposition of the best historians of Rhode Island is, that it was introduced into a mixed and irregular digest of the laws of that colony, which appeared in England, by some timid person, who feared that the English Protestants would complain that Rhode Island gave too much liberty to Catholics, and so that her charter would be revoked; hence, he ventured to make the interpolation to save difficulty.

In 1678 England was thrown into an intense excitement by the general belief in a 'Popish plot' for the assassination of William III. The popular idea was that the Protestants were to be given over to a British St. Bartholomew; the Duke of York, a bigoted Catholic, was to usurp the throne, and all were ready for a bloody civil war. Some friend of Rhode Island may have shared in this panic, but there is not the slightest evidence that its legislators did, especially as they repealed the smuggled clause on discovery. The following [illegible] the law in 1798: 'Whereas a principal object of our venerable ancestors, in their migration to this country and settlement in this State, was, as they expressed it, to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil State may stand and be best maintained with a full liberty in religious concernments; Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, and by the authority thereof it is enacted, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall he be enforced, restrained or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.' This whole legal presentation is found in Robert Walsh's 'Appeal,' an octavo, published in Philadelphia, 1819, pp. 429-435.

Religious liberty for Jews in Rhode Island must be referred to here. At the opening of the seventeenth century, Holland was the only country where they enjoyed this blessing. Their largest European congregation was in Amsterdam, also their Talmud Tora, or school for Hebrew youth. Leonard Busher made the first plea for their liberty in England, in 1614, saying: 'The king and Parliament may please to permit all Christians, yea, Jews, Turks and pagans, so long as they are peaceable and no malefactors.' A second plea was made by Roger Williams, in three passages of his 'Bloody Tenet,' published in London, 1644, one of which reads thus, and the others are of the same tenor: 'It is the will and command of God, that since the coming of his Son, the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to men in all nations and countries. . . .

That civil States with their officers of justice are not governors or defenders of the spiritual and Christian state and worship.' Drs. Featley, Baillie and others charged him with the most shocking blasphemy for this doctrine, and popular indignation was so savage that his book was burned. Samuel Richardson demands, in his work on the 'Necessity of Toleration,' published 1647 (p. 270): 'Whether the priests were not the cause of the burning of the book entitled "The Bloody Tenet," because it was against persecution? And whether their consciences would not have dispensed with the burning of the author of it?' Baillie himself said: 'Liberty of conscience, and toleration of all or any religion, is so prodigious an impiety, that this religious Parliament cannot but abhor the very naming of it. Whatever may be the opinions of John Goodwin, Mr. Williams and some of that stamp, . . . yet Mr. Burroughs explodes that abomination.'

The Jews had been driven from England in 1290, and after banishment for 364 years, they petitioned Cromwell and Parliament for permission to return, that they might trade in the realm and follow their religion. What influence Williams's book had exerted in favor of their return does not appear, but about six years after its publication their request was granted, and in 1656 they built their first synagogue in King Street, London. This controversy was soon transferred to America. Edward Winslow wrote to Winthrop, under date of November 24th, 1645, saying that at a late session of the Legislature they had had a violent contest over the proposition: 'To allow and maintain full and free toleration of religion to all men that would preserve the civil peace and submit unto government, and there was no limitation or exception against Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Nicholayton, Familist, or any other, etc.'

Mr. Winslow says that the mover submitted it to him, and 'Having read it, I told him I utterly abhorred it as such as would make us odious to all Christian commonweals. . . . But our governor and divers of us having expressed that sad consequences would follow, especially myself and Mr. Prence, yet, notwithstanding it was required according to order to be voted. But the governor would not suffer it to come to vote, as being that indeed would eat out the power of godliness, etc. . . . By this you may see that all the troubles of New England are not at the Massachusetts. The Lord in mercy look upon us and allay this spirit of division that is creeping in amongst us.' In direct opposition to this teaching and in harmony with the teaching of Roger Williams, the General Assembly of Rhode Island decreed, in 1647, three years after his publication of the 'Bloody Tenet,' and three years before England permitted Jews to return to the realm, that in this colony, 'ALL men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God.'

In 1649 Edward Winslow published his 'Danger of Tolerating Levelers in a Civil State,' and in 1652 Roger Williams published his letter to Endicott, Governor of Massachusetts, with an Appendix addressed to four classes of the clergy, 'Popish, Prelatical, Presbyterian and Independent,' in which he says of those who refuse to be Christians: 'Yea, if they refuse, deny, oppose the doctrine of Jesus Christ, whether Jews or Gentiles, why should you call for fire from heaven, which suits not with Jesus Christ, his Spirit and ends. Why should you compel them to come in, with any other sword but that of the Spirit of God?' At that time there was no organized Jewish congregation in Great Britain or any of her American Colonies. As early as 1650 a few Portuguese Jews from Holland had found their way to New York against the protest of Peter Stuyvesant, made to the West India Company at Amsterdam in 1654; but as the Jews were large stockholders in that company, they insisted on certain privileges being granted to their co-religionists.

The citizens of New Amsterdam would not train with them in the Burgher Company, and the Jews were exempted from military duty on condition of paying sixty-five stivers per month. In 1655 a special Act permitted them to live and trade there, provided that they would support their own poor. On the 27th of July, 1655, they petitioned for a burying ground, but were refused on the pretext that they had 'no need of it yet;' one of their number dying, on the 14th of February, 1656, they were granted a lot 'for a place of interment,' outside the city. On the 13th of March, 1656, Stuyvesant, director of the Company, was instructed that they should enjoy the same civil and political privileges that they enjoyed in Holland, but that 'they should not presume to exercise religious worship in synagogues or meetings, and when they requested that privilege,' he was to refer the petition to his superiors.'

Still they were not allowed 'to exercise any handicraft or to keep any open retail store,' but they were at liberty to 'exercise their religious worship in all quietness within their houses. To which end they will, doubtless, seek to build their dwellings together in a more convenient place, on the one or the other side of New Amsterdam.' In the spring of 1657 they were admitted to the right of citizenship, but the learned Rabbi Lyons, possibly the highest Hebrew authority on the subject, says in his 'Jewish Calendar' (page 160), that their 'first minutes of congregational affairs, written in Spanish and English, are dated Tishree 20th, 5489—1728,' and that these refer to 'rules and regulations adopted, 5466 — 1706, twenty years previous.' Their first synagogue was not dedicated till 1696, when Samuel Brown was their rabbi. On the same high authority we find that the Jewish congregation, Jeshuat Israel, was openly organized in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1658, under the broad provision of 1647, that 'all men' in that Colony 'may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God.'

Such liberty they had not elsewhere on this globe at that time, Holland not excepted, for even there they were forbidden to speak or to write disparagingly of the Christian religion; to make converts to their own faith; to exercise any handicraft or carry on retail trade; and marriages between Christians and Jews were strictly prohibited.' They labored under none of these restrictions in Rhode Island, but in all these respects stood upon a perfect equality with Baptists, Quakers and other religionists, and that congregation has remained undisturbed to this day, a period of two hundred and twenty-eight years, and is but fourteen years younger than the first Baptist Church of that city. Arnold says that they did much to build up the commercial interests of Newport. Some of them rose in public favor for their services to the State, and on August 20th, 1750, 'Moses Lopez, of Newport, was excused at his own request from all other civil duties, on account of his gratuitous services to the government in translating Spanish documents.'

This indicates that he had done all the civil duties of a freeman up to that time. By the year 1760, the little Jewish congregation at Newport had increased to sixty families, their necessities demanding the erection of a synagogue, which they began to build in 1762, and which their rabbi, Isaac Touro, dedicated to Jehovah in 1763, with 'great pomp and ceremony.' This large increase in their number was due chiefly to the great earthquake of 1755, the center of which was in Spain and Portugal; it swallowed up fifty thousand inhabitants of Lisbon alone. Many of the Jews, who fled for safety from more cruel foes than the yawning earth, came to Rhode Island, where their own brethren had worshiped God in peace and safety for one hundred and eight years. These facts entirely disprove the alleged fact that in 1663-64 Rhode Island passed a law restricting religious liberty to those 'professing Christianity.'

[…]

No class of people more earnestly and gratefully recognize Roger Williams as the apostle of their liberties than do the American Jews. One of their ablest writers says in a recent work: 'The earliest champion of religious freedom, or "soul liberty," as he designated that most precious jewel of all liberties, was Roger Williams. . . . To him rightfully belongs the immortal fame of having been the first person in modern times to assert and maintain in its fullest plenitude the absolute right of every man to "a full liberty in religious concernments," and to found a State wherein this doctrine was the key-stone of its organic laws. . . . Roger Williams, the first pure type of an American freeman, proclaimed the laws of civil and religious liberty, that "the people were the origin of all free power in government," that God has given to men no power over conscience, nor can men grant this power to each other; that the regulation of the conscience is not one of the purposes for which men combine in civil society.

For uttering such heresies, this great founder of our liberties was banished out of the jurisdiction of the Puritans in America. . . . In grateful remembrance of God's merciful providence to him in his distress, he gave to it (the new town) the name of Providence. "I desired," said he, "it might be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience." . . . The infant community at Providence at once set about to frame laws for government, in strict accord with the spirit of the settlement. "Masters of families incorporated together into a township, and such others as they shall admit into the same, only in civil things." This simple instrument is the earliest constitution of government whereof we have any record, which not only tolerated all religions, but recognized as a right, absolute liberty of conscience.'

5. Baptists and Religious Liberty in the American Constitutions

Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Chapter XII, “The American Baptists and Constitutional Liberty” (about pp. 796–813). Abridged; omissions marked […]. English text from uncollated OCR; paragraph divisions supplied by CTS. The interpretations are the author’s.

CTS note: Armitage traces Baptist work for religious liberty in Rhode Island, Virginia, Massachusetts, Vermont and South Carolina. Historians accept the broad outline, and also credit Presbyterians, Quakers and Enlightenment statesmen such as Jefferson and Madison. Some details are disputed or rest on tradition: the story that Jefferson learned democracy at a Baptist church cannot be documented; the religious-liberty article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) was drafted by George Mason and amended by Madison, and Patrick Henry’s share is uncertain; the account of Leland and Madison comes from later recollections. Massachusetts ended its church establishment in 1833. Richard Furman, praised at the end, was also a slaveholder who in 1823 published a defense of slavery, which Armitage does not mention. Words clipped at the page edge in the scan are marked [illegible]; passages on the “American Episcopate,” the Parsons’ Cause, the Baptist address to Washington and Leland’s 1811 speech have been omitted because the OCR is badly damaged there.

Chapter XII. The American Baptists and Constitutional Liberty

Dr. Leonard Bacon writes of the Baptists in his 'New England Theocracy' thus: 'It has been claimed for these Churches that from the age of the Reformation onward they have been always foremost and always consistent in maintaining the doctrine of religious liberty. Let me not be understood as calling in question their right to so great an honor.' But until the American Revolution they had scant means, comparatively, to demonstrate the practical soundness of this claim. Yet when the field was open for experimental proof that it was well founded, they were not found faithless in their relations either to the free constitutions of the several States or to that of the United States. They had little to hope from most of their fellow-colonists, who had gone to the verge of their power in using all social and legal forces to persecute and destroy them as a religious body, and that phase of the question was solemnly considered by them.

When Dr. Samuel Jones went as one of their committee to present their appeal to the Continental Congress he said: 'It seemed unreasonable to us that we should be called to stand up with them in defense of liberty, if, after all, it was to be a liberty for one party to oppress another.' The little Baptist colony of Rhode Island had more to lose and less to gain by revolution than any of her twelve sister colonies. Unlike Massachusetts and Virginia, she had no Governor appointed by the Crown, who could veto her acts of legislation. Bancroft tells us that this State enjoyed after the revolution, 'a form of government under its charter so thoroughly republican that no change was required beyond a renunciation of the King's name, in the style of its public acts.' Revolution would imperil her largest liberties, while complete success in the attempt to secure independence of Britain would add little to the rights which she already possessed.

But should she be conquered she must relinquish even these, for the Crown would appoint her a Governor and control her legislation, at least by the power of the veto. Yet no selfish consideration of this sort weighed with the Baptists of Rhode Island. They saw their brethren of other colonies oppressed more than they were, and as their own love of liberty was a genuine growth, they demanded it as the birthright of all. Hence, they were as ready at once to resist encroachment upon the civil liberties of all the colonies as they had been to defy the unjust exactions of a spiritual tyranny upon themselves. They, therefore, carried with them into the struggle against civil oppression the same spirit which had moved them in resisting all encroachment upon the liberties of the soul. Two months before the Declaration of Independence, and thirty-two days before Virginia renounced allegiance to the Crown, Rhode Island repudiated all allegiance to George III., May 4th, 1776; and immediately after the retreat of General Gage from Concord and Lexington her Legislature voted to send 1,500 men to the scene of conflict.

It is, therefore, a significant testimony to the character of the teaching of Williams and Clarke that the boon which they had given the Rhode Islanders, first the town-meeting and then the Colonial Assembly shorn of all power to touch the question of 'conscience' and shut up to 'civil things,' should in the next century have borne such good fruit. Nearly five generations had passed since the colony was first planted, and now it was willing to imperil its own religious freedom in order to advance the political liberties of other communities. This brought no small strain upon its unselfish patriotism. The Baptists of Virginia took an equally resolute step in favor of independence, but though under different circumstances, not a jot less honorable. Notwithstanding their persecutions by the Colony itself, the moment that the State Convention met to determine the duty of the Colony, sixty Baptist Churches said to this civil body: 'Strike the blow!

Make military resistance to Great Britain, in her unjust invasion, tyrannical oppression and repeated hostilities, and we will sustain you, minister and people.' Virginia had no sympathy with Puritanism, and in her old devotion to the Stuarts had refused to recognize the authority of the Commonwealth. For this Massachusetts had prohibited all intercourse with her, and under the administration of George III., when Patrick Henry introduced his famous Fifth Resolution into the Virginia Legislature, containing the doctrine of revolution, denouncing the Stamp Act, and refusing taxation without representation, the leading men of that body cried with horror, 'Treason! treason!' Campbell, in his history of Virginia, says: 'Speaker Robinson, Peyton Randolph, Richard Bland, Edward Pendleton, George Wythe, and all the leaders in the House and proprietors of large estates made a strenuous resistance.' True, the wonderful eloquence of Henry secured a majority for the resolution, but the men who voted for it were so alarmed by the cry of treason which it provoked that the next day they secured its erasure from the records.

One of the paradoxes of American history has been that, despite the sentiment of many of its leading men thus loyal to the Crown, Virginia should have finally taken front rank amongst the revolting colonies. Jefferson, in his 'Notes on Virginia,' incidentally supplies the clue to this problem. He states that at the time of the Revolution two-thirds of her population had become Dissenters; for the most part they were Quakers, Presbyterians and Baptists. By the intolerable sufferings and indefatigable labors of the Baptist preachers they had cherished and diffused their own love of liberty throughout the whole colony for half a century. Their memorial to the Convention had deeper root than the feeling of the hour; it was grounded in those evangelical convictions which were shared by a majority of the people of Virginia. That Virginia [illegible] her Royalist antecedents aside and loyally espoused the cause of the revolution [illegible] largely due to the fact that Baptist suffering, preaching and democratic practice [illegible] educated her people for the issue.

Thomas Jefferson, possibly an advanced Unitarian; Patrick Henry, a devout Presbyterian; and James Madison, thought to [illegible] liberal Episcopalian, felt the throb of the public heart, saw that its patriotism [illegible] founded upon religious conviction, and, like wise men, instead of stemming [illegible] strong tide they gave it their leadership, under which it swept on, notwithstanding the opposition of English rectors and the entangling traditions of a grinding hierarchy. The Baptists of Virginia, however, did not rush hastily into this struggle, nor were they without a definite purpose; they counted the cost and anticipated [illegible] legitimate result of their position. The records of the Colonial Convention, [illegible] 20th, 1776, say that: 'A petition of sundry persons of the Baptist Church, in the County of [illegible] William, whose names are thereunto subscribed, was presented to the Convention and read, setting forth that at [illegible] time when this colony, with the others, is contending for the civil rights of mankind, against the enslaving schemes of a powerful enemy, they are persuaded the strictest unanimity is necessary among ourselves, and that every remaining cause of division may, if possible, be removed, they think it their duty to petition for the following religious privileges, which they have [illegible] yet been indulged with in this part of the world, to wit: That they be allowed to worship God in their own way, without interruption; that they be permitted to maintain their own ministers and none others; that they may be married, buried and the like without paying the clergy of other denominations; that, these things granted, they will gladly unite with their brethren, and [illegible] the utmost of their ability promote the common cause.

Ordered, that the said petition be referred to the Committee of Propositions and Grievances; that they inquire into the allegations thereof and report the same, with their opinions thereupon, to the Convention.' The Baptists concealed nothing. For full liberty, civil and religious, they [illegible] ready to give their lives and all that they had, but for less they would risk nothing; they might as well be the civil vassals of Britain as the religious vassals of a [illegible] in Virginia. This was understood all around, and hence they kept influential commissioners in constant attendance on the Legislature and Conventions of the State from the beginning to the close of the struggle for perfect religious freedom; [illegible] as Bishop Meade expresses it, when their full rights were secured: 'The war begun by the Baptists seven and twenty years before was now finished.'

They had a great advantage in the fact that the three men who were the [illegible] prominently identified with the Revolutionary cause in Virginia espoused their cause and co-operated with them — Jefferson, Henry and Madison. This was due, perhaps, on their part, to the same deep religious conviction which actuated [illegible] Baptists. But in their immense breadth of mind, logical adherence to conclusions drawn from those premises which justified the Revolution, brought these mighty men to the same positions. Jefferson comprehended Baptist aims perfectly, for he was in perpetual intercourse with their leading men, and they intrusted him with the charge of their public documents. His mother was an Episcopalian, but his favorite aunt, her sister, Mrs. Woodson, was a Baptist. These two sisters were the daughters of Isham Randolph, Mrs. Woodson residing in Goochland County. When young he loved to visit her house and accompany her to the Baptist Church, of which she and her husband were members.

It is through the members of his uncle's and aunt's family, as well as through the Madisons, that the tradition has come down that he caught his first views of a democratic form of government while attending these meetings. A letter lies before the writer from Mrs. O. P. Moss, of Missouri, whose husband was a direct descendant of the Woodson family; his mother knew Jefferson intimately, and has kept the tradition alive in the family. She says that 'when grown to manhood these impressions became so fixed that upon them he formulated the plan of a free government and based the Declaration of Independence.' Jefferson himself speaks of his close intimacy with the Baptists in the following epistle, already referred to in Chapter VIII: 'To the members of the Baptist Church of Buck Mountain, in Albemarle; Monticello, April 18th, 1809: I thank you, my friends and neighbors, for your kind congratulations on my return to my native home, and of the opportunities it will give me of enjoying, amidst your affections, the comforts of retirement and rest.

Your approbation of my conduct is the more valued as you have best known me, and is an ample reward for any services I may have rendered. We have acted together from the origin to the end of a memorable revolution, and we have contributed, each in the line allotted to us, our endeavors to render its issues a permanent blessing to our country. That our social intercourse may, to the evening of our days, be cheered and cemented by witnessing the freedom and happiness for which we have labored, will be my constant prayer. Accept the offering of my affectionate esteem and respect.' Elder John Leland speaks of his intimacy with Jefferson. In his Address on an Elective Judiciary, he found it necessary to repel certain charges against his beau ideal statesman, and says: 'I lived in Virginia, from December 1770, until April, 1791, not far from Monticello; yet I never heard a syllable of either of these crimes.'

There was a oneness of views and a mutual esteem in all that relates to religious liberty between him and the Baptists. John Leland was in constant communication with him on this subject, and he only spoke their sentiments when he said of Jefferson, that 'By his writing and administration, he has justly acquired the title of the Apostle of Liberty.' The replies of Jefferson to three Baptist Associations, and to the Baptists of Virginia in General Meeting assembled, speak of the satisfaction which the review of his times gave him, in remembering his long and earnest cooperation with them in achieving the religious freedom of America. Early in his life Patrick Henry evinced his deep sympathy with them on the same point, for Semple says of the immortal patriot and orator and of the efforts to attain full liberty of conscience: 'It was in making these attempts that they were so fortunate as to interest in their behalf the celebrated Patrick Henry; being always the friend of liberty, he only needed to be informed of their oppression — without hesitation, he stepped forward to their relief.

From that time, until the day of their complete emancipation from the shackles of tyranny, the Baptists found in Patrick Henry an unwavering friend.' It is supposed that he drew up the noble petition of the Presbytery of Hanover, addressed to the Virginia Colonial Convention, in favor of religious liberty, Oct. 7th, 1776, and if he did, it is enough to render his name immortal, for no abler document on the subject was ever submitted to that or any other body. William Wirt Henry, his grandson, claims, that his renowned ancestor was the real author of the sixteenth section of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which guarantees perfect religious liberty. George Mason, Edmund Randolph and Patrick Henry were all members of the Committee that framed it; and Randolph says, that when Mason submitted his draft for the consideration of the Committee, he had not made proper provisions for religious liberty.

Whereupon, Patrick Henry proposed the fifteenth and sixteenth sections in these words: 'That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, and not by force or violence; and, therefore, that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrates, unless, under the color of religion, any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or the safety of society; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.' Mr. Madison, however, who was also a member of the Committee, detected serious danger lurking in the word 'toleration,' and moved this amendment, which was adopted, first by the Committee, and on May 6, 1776, by the Convention: 'That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity toward each other.'

Jefferson was not in the Convention which framed this Bill, but nine years afterwards he served on a Committee of the General Assembly to revise the laws for the new State, when he submitted the following, which was adopted, Dec. 16, 1785, and is still the fundamental law of Virginia: 'An Act to establish Religious Freedom: Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.'

James Madison had as close relationship to the Baptists as his two illustrious peers, and made himself intimately acquainted with their radical views on the subject of religious equality. Honest John Leland says of him: 'From a child, he was a pattern of sobriety, sturdy and inflexible justice. From an intimate acquaintance with him, I feel satisfied that all the State of Massachusetts, for a bribe, would not buy a single vote of him. A saying of his is fresh in my memory: "It is ridiculous for a man to make use of underhand means to carry a point, although he should know the point is a good one; it would be doing evil that good might come." This saying of his better describes the man than my pen can do.' General Madison, his brother, was a member of a Baptist Church, and their family took a deep interest in the struggles of the denomination.

James was one of the youngest members of the Convention which adopted the Bill of Rights, and it required no small judgment and nerve to oppose the idea of 'toleration' on abstract principles there, or to support the tenet that 'all men are entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to their own consciences.' One measure succeeded another, in opposition to the legally established religion of Virginia, in which the Baptists took the leading part at times, and on some measures stood entirely alone, until in the main through the influence of these three great statesmen, the last step was taken in 1802; the glebes were ordered to be sold in payment of the public debt, on the ground that they had been purchased by a public tax, and belonged to the State. Thus ended the struggle for religious liberty in Virginia, and with the disappearance of the Established Church, the last vestige of ecclesiastical tyranny was wiped from the statute-books of that State.

The most worthy Baptist writers have never claimed that their Baptist fathers achieved this grand result alone, nor could such a claim be sustained. They were the most numerous body of dissenters in Virginia, and were a unit in this effort, but they were earnestly aided by all the Quakers and most of the Presbyterians, as lesser but influential bodies. 'Tories' and 'traitors' were held at a large discount in both these denominations, and there were few of them. Indeed, so far as appears, the twenty-seven Presbyterians who met at Charlotte, N. C., May, 1775, to represent the County of Mecklenburg in patriotic convention were the first American body which declared itself 'a free and independent people; (who) are, and of right ought to be, a sovereign and self-governing association, under the control of no power other than that of our God and the general government of the Congress.' Besides, at that time, there were good reasons why the Quakers, Presbyterians and Baptists should stand firmly together in favor of religious liberty. From 1749, a plan had been openly pushed in England, to force an American Episcopate on all the American Colonies; it excited the deepest alarm in all the non-Episcopal Churches, and did much to fan the revolutionary flame.

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This question brought the Presbyterians and Baptists to common ground, with slight exceptions. The Presbyterians had not been true to the principle of full religious liberty in the Old World more than the Congregationalists had been in the New, and thousands of them had found a home in Virginia as early as [illegible], under the promise of protection from that colony. They came to have a touch of fellow-feeling with their suffering Baptist brethren, hence they were able to say in their Hanover Memorial, of 1777: 'In this enlightened age, and in a land where all of every denomination are united in the most strenuous efforts to be free, we hope and expect that our representatives will cheerfully concur in removing every species of religious as well as civil bondage. Certain it is, that every argument for civil liberty gains additional strength when applied to liberty in the concerns of religion.'

'Honor to whom honor,' the Bible demands. While this contest was in progress, however, another, quite as warm and vastly more important, was waged in regard to the Constitution of the United States, and chiefly through the same agencies. This great civil document was adopted by the Constitutional Convention and submitted for ratification to the several States, September 17th, 1787, nine States being needed to ratify the same. Immediately it met with strong opposition from all the States, some for one reason and some for another. Its only provision on the subject of religion was found in Article VI, thus: 'No religious Test shall ever be required, as a Qualification to any office or public Trust under the United States.' Great dissatisfaction prevailed with many of its provisions, and there was serious danger of its rejection for a time.

Dissatisfaction with this provision lodged with the Baptists in all the States, but Virginia became their great battle-field. On the 7th of March, 1788, the representatives of all their Churches met in their General Committee in Goochland, and the minutes of the meeting say: 'The first Religious Political subject that was taken up was: Whether the new Federal Constitution, which had now lately made its appearance in public, made sufficient provision for the secure enjoyment of religious liberty; on which it was agreed unanimously that it did not.' Many of the political and social leaders of Virginia were opposed to the Constitution, and amongst them Patrick Henry, who resisted its adoption in the Virginia Convention, because, as he phrased his difficulty, it 'squinted toward monarchy,' and gave no guarantee of religious liberty. Here a pleasant incident may be noticed, in which John Leland figures very honorably.

James Madison led the Virginia party which favored ratification, but was in Philadelphia during the election of delegates to the State Convention, engaged with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton in preparing that memorable series of political papers, written in defense of the Constitution, and known as the 'Federalist.' When he returned to Virginia, he found that Leland had been nominated in Orange, his own county, by the party opposed to ratification, against himself, as the delegate in favor of that measure. Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, says, that Leland told him that Madison called on him and carefully explained the purposes of the Constitution with his arguments in its support. The opposing candidates soon met at a political meeting, in the presence of most of the voters, when Madison mounted a hogshead of tobacco, and for two hours addressed his fellow-citizens in a calm, candid and statesmanlike manner, presenting his side of the case and meeting all the arguments of his opponents. Though he was not eloquent, the people listened with profound respect, and said Leland: 'When he left the hogshead, and my friends called for me, I took it, and went in for Mr. Madison.' 'A noble Christian patriot,' remarks Governor Briggs; 'that single act, with the motives [illegible]

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There was the same opposition in Massachusetts to the ratification of the United States Constitution that there was in Virginia, and much for the same reasons. Isaac Backus took about the same ground that Patrick Henry had taken in Virginia, because he could not see that it sufficiently guaranteed religious liberty. Manning and Stillman were wiser in their generation. Stillman [illegible] been chosen a delegate from Boston to the State Convention of Massachusetts, which was to accept or reject this instrument, a body numbering nearly 400 members. Manning hastened to Massachusetts, and for two weeks was indefatigable [illegible] argument and appeal to induce all Baptist delegates and other Baptists of influence to aid in securing first all that the unamended Constitution did secure. It [illegible] very grave crisis, the public spirit was in a feverish state, and these two great [illegible] had their hands full to secure the full support of their own brethren.

They knew [illegible] this document had not secured everything needful to them, but they also [illegible] that such a revolution could not go backward excepting through alienation between the States. The Convention was in session for a month, half of which [illegible] Stillman and Manning were at work, and when the final vote was taken the Constitution was ratified by 187 to 168 votes. Massachusetts adopted the Constitution of the United States February 6th, 1788. After the vote, in which the Baptists [illegible] the balance of power, John Hancock, the President of the Convention, invited Dr. Manning to return thanks to God, and it is said that the lofty spirit of piety [illegible] patriotism which marked his prayer filled the Convention with reverence and [illegible] So far as the Massachusetts Baptists were concerned, this great opportunity [illegible] neither missed nor mismanaged, but was made an important step toward freedom.

Massachusetts had formed a State Constitution in 1780, and in that Convention the Baptists contended with pertinacity for their religious rights. Noah Alden, a lineal descendant of the Plymouth family, was a member of this Convention, and at that time pastor of the Baptist Church at Bellingham. He was also a member of the Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States. When the famous Massachusetts Bill of Rights was reported he moved [illegible] recommit the third article, which gave power to the rulers in religious affairs, [illegible] was made a member of a committee of seven to consider the subject and although he could not secure equality before the law for all sects in Massachusetts, he [illegible] procure so much concession as to excite marvel at the time, it was so far in advance of anything that this State had previously known in religious liberality.

It [illegible] the power of the civil rulers to provide for the support of religion in towns where such provision was not made voluntarily; it required attendance on public worship, 'if there were any religious teachers on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend'; it provided that the people should have [illegible] exclusive right of electing their public teachers, and of contracting with them for their support and maintenance; it gave the right of the hearer to apply his public payments of religious tax 'to the support of the public teacher or teachers of his own religious sect or denomination, provided there be any on whose instruction he attends,' and every denomination of Christians, demeaning themselves peaceably and as good subjects of the common wealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law, and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.'

This wonderful gain in the Bill of Rights did not dis-establish the Church in Massachusetts, which was still protected under the several exceptions of the article, but it broke its tyrannical power, and in a little more than half a century it wrought the entire separation of Church and State in Massachusetts. It met with the most violent resistance in the Convention, and a leader of the opposition said: 'We believe in our consciences that the best way to serve God is to have religion protected and ministers of the Gospel supported by law, and we hope that no gentleman here will wish to wound our tender consciences.' 'The plain English of which,' says Leland, 'is, our consciences dictate that all the common-wealth of Massachusetts must submit to our judgments, and if they do not they will wound our tender consciences.'

Alden was nobly sustained in this Convention by Dr. Asaph Fletcher, who was also a member, and a strong advocate of this measure. Under its provisions many ungracious acts were perpetrated, and all sorts of quibbles, pretexts and pleas that ingenious but wounded pride could invent were invoked to annoy the Baptists, but this Bill struck a death-blow at persecution proper in Massachusetts. The new Constitution was soon put to the test, for several persons were taxed at Attleboro, in 1780, to support the parish Church, although they attended elsewhere. Elijah Balkom was seized, and having sued the assessors for damages, judgment was had against him; but, on an appeal to the County Court at Taunton, he obtained damages and costs. In 1783 a similar case, in many respects, occurred in Cambridge, where Baptists were sued to support the Standing Order, and their money extorted, but they sued for its return and it was paid back.

These annoyances continued and sometimes were grievous enough. In a letter from Dr. Backus to William Richards, dated May 28th, 1796, he says: 'Though the teachers and rulers in the uppermost party in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont are as earnest as ever Pharaoh was to hold the Church of Christ under the taxing power of the world, yet that power is daily consuming by the spirit of God's mouth.' To meet and thwart these attempts the Warren Association kept a vigilant committee in existence. In 1797 it consisted of Drs. Stillman, Smith and Backus, with Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Grafton, to whom the oppressed Churches appealed for counsel and help, and they did good service indeed. John Leland said, 1801: 'In the year 1800 about six hundred dollars were taken from the Baptists, in Partridge-field, for the building of a meeting-house in said town for another denomination.

The case is now in law, hung up, and what the event will be we know not.' Great hopes were entertained that the Convention held November [illegible], 1820, to amend the Constitution, would entirely dissolve the last bond of union between Church and State in Massachusetts; but this was defeated, chiefly by the determined [illegible] of John Adams, who was a member of that body. Isaac Backus died in 1806, after a life of astonishing activity in the [illegible] religious freedom.

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In 1811 Judge Parsons gave a decision to the effect, that no congregation [illegible] society not incorporated by law could claim [illegible] the privileges which the [illegible] claimed under the Bill of Rights, and alarm awakened them throughout the State. Petitions were circulated everywhere and sent to the Legislature, praying for a revision of the religious laws, and the people of Cheshire elected Elder Leland [illegible] that body for the purpose of pleading their cause.

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But their prayers were not heard, and their most strenuous efforts at reform were unavailing, until the people arose in their might and so amended the Bill of Rights in 1833 that the Church and State were forever separated, since which time what Leland called the 'felonious principle' has been banished from the statute books of all the States, and, as Leland did not die until 1841, he breathed free air for the last seven years of his life, to his great health and delectation. He lived to be eighty-seven years of age, and deserved ten years of fresh air after he had labored sixty-seven years to vindicate the civil and religious right of all men. Rest, royal old warrior, rest on the Cheshire hills, which thou didst so much to make free! In Vermont the contest was neither so long nor so severe. The lands which now form Vermont were claimed in part by New Hampshire and in part by New York, and were originally known as the 'New Hampshire grants.'

Their inhabitants applied to the Continental Congress for admission into the confederacy in 1770, but, New York opposing, they withdrew. The next year they proclaimed themselves independent and formed a Constitution, and were admitted into the Union in 1791. Dr. Asaph Fletcher had removed from Massachusetts to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1787, and was a member of the Convention which applied for the admission of the State into the Union. He was also a member of the Convention of 1793 to revise the State Constitution, when he contended for the separation of Church and State, but the contrary idea prevailed. Such a vital subject could not long rest, however, especially with Dr. Fletcher in active service as a member of the legislature, a Judge of the County Court, a member of the Council, and a State Presidential elector. In 1780, two years after Fletcher's settlement in Vermont, he was followed by Rev. Aaron Leland, from Bellingham, Mass. His liberal political sentiments soon commended him to his fellow-citizens, and he was elected to the General Assembly.

There he served as Speaker of the House for three years, and for four years he was one of the Governor's Council. For five years, also, he was Lieutenant-Governor of the State, and for eighteen he was an Assistant Justice in the County Court. He had large influence amongst the Baptists of the State, as well as with its citizens generally, and in 1828 he declined a nomination for Governor, fearing that the office would interfere too much with his pastoral duties. He was a Fellow of Middlebury College, possessed great mental power, and was a very forcible debater. While he was Speaker of the House a proposition came before it for a dissolution of Church and State, and in the discussion some one [illegible] weak enough to say that Christianity would go down if the State withdrew its support. This stirred all the fervor of his spirit.

He left the chair and took part in the debate, delivering one of the strongest speeches ever heard in Vermont in favor of religious liberty, the main strength of his position being that God had founded his Church upon a rock, and that the gates of hell should not prevail against her. A third Vermont Baptist champion of religious freedom is found in Ezra Butler, who, in 1785, removed from Claremont, N. H., to Waterbury, Vt., where, about 1800, he became a Baptist and formed a Church, which he served as pastor for more than thirty years. His talents and high character induced his fellow-citizens to intrust him with civil office, first as town clerk, justice of the peace, then as member of the Legislature, [illegible] also as Chief Justice for Washington County. In 1813-15 he served his State in Congress, and from 1826 to 1828 he [illegible] Governor of Vermont, with Aaron Leland as Lieutenant-Governor, both Baptist ministers at the time.

Under these great leaders and their compeers public sentiment finally threw aside the union of Church and State in Vermont, distancing Massachusetts by a number of years in that race. South Carolina Baptists stood firmly for religious liberty. The State [illegible] its Constitution in 1776, and amended it in 1778 and 1790; but the Baptists [illegible] early awake to the need of securing their rights, and as early as 1779 the Charleston Association made it the duty of a standing committee 'to labor for the perfect equality of all religious people before the law, and for this purpose they were [illegible] treat with the government in behalf of the Churches.' No one contributed more to the result of civil and religious liberty in Georgia than did the noted Richard Furman, D.D., of whom a brief sketch may here be given. He was born [illegible] Esopus, N. Y., in 1755, but, while an infant, his parents removed to South Carolina and settled on the High Hills of Santee.

Here, after a good early education, he became a Christian, and at the age of eighteen began to preach, with a remarkable degree of clearness, devotion and force, for a youth. The district where [illegible] labored lay to the east and north of the rivers Wateree and Santee, where wickedness abounded. He formed many Churches, which united with the Charleston Association. He was extremely modest, but his unassuming ardor, with his ripeness of judgment in interpreting Scripture, and his uncommon pungency of appeal, awakened universal surprise and admiration. He was scarcely twenty-two when the Revolution commenced, and he avowed himself at once a firm Whig and threw all his powers into the American cause. When the British invaded South Carolina he was obliged to retire into North Carolina and Virginia, and afterwards Cornwallis put a price on his head. In Virginia he became intimate with Patrick Henry, who presented him with certain books, which are cherished in the Furman family to this day.

In 1787 he accepted the pastoral charge of the Baptist Church in Charleston, where he remained for eight and thirty years, and became intimate with those patriot families, the Pinckneys, Rutledges and Sumters, together with whom he labored earnestly for the Revolutionary cause. When independence was achieved, and the leading men of the State were selected to meet in convention and form a new Constitution, their suffrages made him a member of that body, in which he contended earnestly against the exclusion of Christian ministers from certain civil offices, and did much to secure soul-liberty in the State. So nobly had he blended his patriotism with the refinement and urbanity of a holy character, that on the death of Washington and Hamilton he was appointed by the Cincinnati and the Revolution Society to deliver orations in tribute to their memory: Taken altogether, he was a most eminent servant of God and of his country.

The late Dr. W. R. Williams said: 'Of this eminent servant of the Lord it is difficult to express what is just and proper without the appearance of excessive partiality. To represent him in the ordinary terms of eulogy, or to depict his virtues by any of the common standards of description, would be the direct way to fall short of the truth. The Providence of God gives few such men to the world as Dr. Furman. . . . Where others were great he was transcendent, and where others were fair and consistent in character, he stood forth lovely and luminous in all the best attributes of man. . . . In general learning he had made such progress as would have ranked him among men of the first intelligence in any country. . . . His studies were chiefly confined to mathematics, metaphysics, belles-lettres, logic, history and theology; He cultivated also an acquaintance with the ancient classics, particularly Homer, Longinus and Quintilian, with whose beauties and precepts he was familiar.

He read with sedulous attention all the writers of the Augustan age of English literature, and whatever the language possessed valuable in criticism and immortal in poetry. There are few men, it is believed, who have had their minds more richly stored with the fine passages of Milton, Young, Pope, Addison, Butler and other great authors than Dr. Furman. From them he could quote properly, and appositely for almost every occasion, what was most beautiful and eloquent. He possessed uncommon talent in discerning the utility of those studies connected with the mind, and in condensing them into such abstracts as to make them clearly intelligible to every capacity. In this way he could analyze and expound the principles of moral philosophy and logic, with a facility which could only have resulted from a ready mastery over the subjects. But that which imparted a charm to his whole life was the godly savor which pervaded and sweetened all his superior endowments and qualifications. All the vigor of his noble intellect was consecrated to God. All the matured fruit of his long experience was an oblation to the Father of Mercies. All the variety of his acquirements, and all the vastness of his well-furnished mind, were merged in one prevailing determination to know nothing save Christ crucified.'