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day, and their influence is now felt by millions. The secession, or rather the expulsion, of Roger Williams let loose the floodgates of controversy, and turned the attention of the colonists from mere theological questions to those which savored of the secular. The tide once turned, it pursued its course, and as dialectics subsided, reflections on the abstract principles of liberty, the fondness for discussing which is so prominent a feature of the Northerner, usurped their places. The science of politics is a practical one, and none have applied the principles of liberty more practically than the New Englander. But, on the other hand, while he acts practically, no one delights more in the abstractions of that subject than he. When the disputation of the pulpit died away, secular debate took its place, and, without yielding their love of abstractions, the theories of political life took the place of theological dogmas. Every American can recall the time, when, a beardless boy, he harangued his debating-society on the exceeding great glory of liberty, the different modes of government, the distinction between the several kinds of law, as, for example, the moral and the municipal; and can remember, as of but yesterday, when he discussed, with the ease which only the assurance of youth can give, questions before which Plato and Machiavel gave up the ghost in despair. The effect of such discussions on the youth of a republic is simply incalculable. Though it may be adverse to depth and thoroughness, it certainly produces familiarity with the subject, and a confidence which is of all importance to one who, from the mere fact that he is a voter, is, in a certain sense, a legislator. Without laying this national tendency entirely at the door of a Massachusetts conventicle, it is nevertheless the fact, that this latent tendency was, as far as New England is concerned, warmed into life by it, and that these discussions can be followed back in an unbroken stream to the times when secular and forensic debate rose on the ruins of its progenitor, the theological disputation of the Puritan divines.

Such was one of the effects of the early controversial theology of New England. It intensified in the breasts of one of the most practical people on earth a love of abstraction, and aroused a fondness for discussing the abstract principles of liberty, which might have been often tempered by them to their benefit, but which has never left them.

The pent-up enthusiasm and mental activity of the colonists had not long to wait before the sluices were opened, and the lifegiving flood was suffered to pour over the fields. It was in the earliest days of the Boston settlement that there appeared a man about whom his fellow-colonists had much to say, and in whom posterity still takes the deepest interest. This interest is not misplaced, and the character and the career of Roger Williams merit all the attention given them; for, before Richelieu had laid the axe to the root of intolerance in France by making the church secondary to the state; before Descartes had parted his lips with the utterance Cogito, ergo sum, which prepared the way for freedom of thought by recognizing the importance of the individual; before the Baconian philosophy had given new direction to inquiry, this man had maintained that free religion and freedom of thought were essential elements of the body politic; and while Europe was yet the battlefield where contending creeds strove for mastery, and while Protestantism, dead to noble impulses, was sunk into drivelling disputation, and faith everywhere betrayed no force other than what lay in the gripe of intolerance, then it was that the voice of Roger Williams was heard in the wilderness crying truths which were to be thenceforth accepted by the world as vital forces of social, religious, and political life.

Freedom of conscience, until his time, had been regarded as a dream, or entertained only as a theory; after his time it was a positive, substantial fact. His work in life seems to have been that of transforming this sentiment into a living force, and to him is due the honor of being the first who recognized it as a constitutional principle, and who actually erected a polity that had it for a foundation-stone. The effect of this action is incalculable; but it is enough to say, that, from that moment, a new force was infused into American life, and that the Americans then began to assume the character which distinguishes them to-day. The es

tablishment of freedom of conscience as a constitutional element of the body politic effected, sooner or later, a total change in the character of American society. The Englishmen in America began to cease being such, and to put on new armor that had been welded on the spot, and, after the lapse of two centuries and more, it is no exaggeration to style the man who brought this transformation to pass, the First of the Americans.

ROGER WILLIAMS.

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Roger Williams was probably a Welchman, who had drifted to London, where he attracted the attention of no less a person than Sir Edward Coke. There must have been something powerfully attractive in him to kindle the sympathy of that dry and crabbed lawyer, but so it was, and Coke's interest being happily of the practical sort, exercised itself in giving the lad an education. He first procured him admission to what is now known as the Charterhouse, or Blue Coat School, and afterward had him entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge. The world has never been in haste to ascribe excessive goodness of heart to Coke, and it may be that to his sagacity rather than to sympathy, is due the foresight which detected greatness in Williams, and the kindness that fostered him but whatever the motive, it was a good one, and to Coke must be assigned the credit of having given to the world one of its foremost men.

After he had taken orders in the Church of England, his whole view of religion, and particularly, of the relations which religion ought to hold toward the conscience of the individual and the powers of the State, underwent a radical change. He could no longer subscribe the Articles of Faith, and, cutting loose from the Church, he became a Puritan, or rather, as the term meant in those early days, a Reformer; and a reformer he certainly was in every sense of the word that is good and noble. At last, his safety being threatened, flight was the only thing left him, and so, without having time to say farewell to his benefactor, he shook the dust of England from off his feet, and bent his way toward Massachusetts.

When he reached America he was about thirty years of age. His mind was active and clear, and he reasoned well; he had studied hard, and was learned; he had thought much, and was a man of opinions; he had sought light, and had convictions; he was ambitious, resolute, courageous, and of inflexible will; he had winning manners,' and being of an amiable, sociable disposition, was born to persuade men-yet the first thing he did was to set them against him.

Much has been said of the short career which terminated

1 "A man lovely in his carriage."-Edward Winslow, “Hypocrisy Unm 65. The New England literature of the time teems with Roger William for a modern view of him, and for citation of authorities, consult Dex' to Roger Williams," though not written in a very friendly spirit.

the expulsion of Williams from the infant settlements of Massachusetts Bay, and the agitation caused by his abrupt departure does not seem even yet to have entirely subsided. It has not in itself, however, greater importance than any event has which may be regarded as the first step from which great results have flowed, and it may be dismissed after a brief consideration.

The facts of the case are few and simple, and the affair may be summarily described as follows:-Roger Williams, a licensed member of a hierarchy, and an accepted member of an oligarchy, conscientiously made use of his position to preach doctrines which were viewed by the hierarchy as heretical, and by the oligarchy as seditious. For such offence he was conscientiously tried, convicted, and sentenced. Before the sentence was executed, and while it was yet held in suspense, he contumaciously repeated the offence, and the indignation of the authorities being thus excited, he deemed it best to flee the colony; and this he did.

The part performed by those who sat in judgment on him is perfectly intelligible. The colonists had sought seclusion for the very purpose of enjoying their peculiar tenets unmolested, and to effect this purpose the corporation of which they were members was rendered a close one to those outside and a disciplinary body to those within. From circumstances and from the charter, civil power was lodged almost exclusively in the hands of the members, and from their character and disposition this power was allied with, and was made subservient to the ecclesiastical power. There being but one creed the result was an oligarchy. Those were the days when the union of Church and State seemed natural, and, in this respect, if the colonists were no better they were not much worse than the most civilized communities of their day. By the standard of their times must they be judged, for it would be unreasonable to exact of a community that it should reflect greater light than what was shed upon it. If, then, the Puritans are to be censured, they must be so for the oligarchy which they erected, and for exacting and excessive exercise of a principle at that time universally admitted to be true; but for the principle itself they cannot be held responsible, however false it may be, inasmuch as it was not in their power to know better. No Roger Williams had yet taught them better things; for his ideas, still confused, half-formed, and urged with hysterical energy, had not

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assumed the harınonious and systematic shape in which we behold them, nor were they presented as those which had been tried by experience; and they lacked the self-asserting force that time only can give to doctrine. The admitted fact, that Williams was in advance of the age, blunts of itself the edge of censure, which must be reserved for the descendants of these Puritans, who maintained this principle long after Williams and his disciples had exposed its fallacy, and long after freedom of conscience had displayed its surpassing worth and set them a bright example in other communities. It is not strange that, wanting the power of vision to discern in the new light which broke so abruptly upon their eye the dawn of a brighter and better day than that in which they were groping, the colonists should behold in a rising sun only another of the many false lights which had already to their sorrow gone out in utter darkness. To us their error may be plain enough, but it must be admitted, that, from their standpoint, and it was the only one they had, they acted rationally and displayed a sense of duty in promptly resisting innovations which threatened to unsettle their faith and to disturb the repose they were bound as trustees to do their utmost to maintain. To a people who regarded reverence for the king as a virtue second only to reverence for God, and to whose existence it was essential that the ground they stood upon should be theirs,—to such a people, the assertion that the appellation of "most Christian king" conveyed a falsehood, and the denial of their patent's validity implied in the proposition that the Indian title never had been and never could be divested by an alien, even though he were the King of England, were serious and shocking things which combined within them disloyalty to the crown and hostility to the settlement and what could be more abominable and monstrous to those to whom the union of Church and State seemed natural, and who were themselves oligarchists, than the denial that the Establishment was a church, and that the civil power had nothing to do with executing its decrees, even if it were? In fact, when we consider what the age was, and how far Williams was in advance of it, we have no right to be astonished at the course taken by the colonists in his case, nor is there ground for censuring them; the less so, as the more conscientious they were, the more relentless they had to be, their principles being accepted as