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that "the bible alone is the religion of Protestants," nor confiding in the power of merely moral means to promote the triumphs of the church, they expressed at once the height of his offence, their dislike of his sentiments, and their apology for persecution, when they said that "his principles tended to anabaptistry."*

In this age and in this commonwealth, it is not easy for one adequately to conceive of the feelings of abhorrence with which the rulers. of the Church and the State, both in Old and New England, and throughout all Christendom, looked upon the rise of what they thought to be so portentous an evil. Sometimes the more clear sighted among them spoke of it in a manner which indicated a dread of its moral power, while others treated it as a weak vagary of unquiet minds, destined soon to expire without leaving scarcely a trace of its existence. Baxter said, that at one time when England had little experience of its tendency and consequents, people used to speak of it as a temporary conceit

* The expression of the ruling elder of Plymouth was, that he would run the same course of rigid separation and anabaptistry, which Mr. Smyth, at Amsterdam, had done; and it is said by Morton and Hubbard, that having removed to Salem, "in one year's time he filled that place with principles of rigid separation and tending to anabaptistry."-Backus, I. p. 56.

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of some heated spirits.* For the most part those who looked attentively at its nature and operation, were inspired with a strange dread of its influence, and a feeling of relentless hostility toward it. Three hundred years are just completed since the edict of Henry VIII, which proclaimed a general pardon for almost all heretics except the Anabaptists. That very year, thirtyone of them were martyred at Delft in Holland, the men being beheaded and the women drowned.‡ It was certainly a remarkable year, for three men and one woman (called “Donatists, new dipt,") bore faggots at St. Paul's cross, and one man and woman were burnt at Smithfield. This spirit of persecution is not so much to be wondered at as to be deplored. In a country where ecclesiastical and civil power were united, where every native was supposed to be born into the church as well as the state, where baptism had become both the seal of salvation and the sign of citizenship, where the parish register furnished to the ruler the statistics of population and to the individual the proof of his civil birthright, who can tell with what ter

* Sylvester's Baxter, part I. 41.

† Acts and Monuments, II. 358.

Dutch Martyr, lib. II. p. 123, quoted by Crosby.

§ Stoes chron. in Fuller, B. 5. p. 229. § 11.

rors the very name of anabaptistry was invested! As its chief and essential element, it proclaimed that the christian dispensation recognises no bond of union with the visible church, except a voluntary profession of christian faith. With what a decisive meaning did it strike at the established order of things in Europe: how directly was it seen to aim its blow at every legal bond which united the church and the state! Here and there, in one and another age, as these principles sprung up in some congenial soil or some obscure recess, the foot of civil power was put forth to crush them. At different times and in different countries they had appeared and passed away, had flourished for a while in peaceful obscurity, then being brought out to the light, received their chief attestations from the voice of expiring martyrs. No wonder that to many anabaptistry would seem as the chimera of some erratic mind, destined only for a short period to ruffle the surface of society and then for ever disappear. Yet wherever the spirit of religious inquiry has been much awakened, wherever the word of God unbound 'hath moved the hearts of the people, there anabaptistry hath appeared; appeared too amongst the sincere, the humble, the devout men of the earth. Over their minds the principle reigned with power, and amidst

storms of adversity they prophesied that its day would come. Thence the first planting of it on the American continent is an event of great importance, whether we consider the agitation which from age to age it has caused in Europe, or its workings in society since it found an asylum in the new world.

As the founder of this Church was the founder of the Commonwealth, a proper occasion has been embraced by this community to commemorate his worth as the first Christian legislator who proclaimed and established that principle of religious freedom, which constitutes the glory of Rhode-Island.* It is therefore the less needful now that I should narrate the events connected with his purchase of this territory of the Indians, and the organization of the civil government. Among the statesmen of the world he holds a singular pre-eminence, and comparing him with them, it is but just to say in the words of a living historian, "He was the first in modern christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law, and in its defence he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and superior of Jeremy Taylor." From first to last

* Judge Pitman's Centennial Address, Providence, 1836. + Bancroft's History of the United States, v. I. p. 375.

this principle has been fondly cherished throughout Rhode-Island, and has impressed its character on all her legislation. In the words of another, "In her code of laws, we read for the first time since christianity ascended the throne of the Cæsars, that conscience should be free, and men should not be punished for worshipping God as they were persuaded he required, a declaration which to the honor of Rhode-Island she has never departed from. It still shines among her laws with an argument for its support in the shape of a preamble, which has rarely been surpassed in power of thought or felicity of expression."*

It is a just matter of wonder that in that age, and from a monarch like Charles II, a charter embodying a principle so dreaded as a source of anarchy, could have been in any way obtained. It is doubtless true that his desire to tolerate the Catholics in England, disposed him favorably towards a proposition from a Puritan colonist, which would secure to Catholics the undisturbed enjoyment of their religion in this distant part of his dominion. In such a combination of events, however, Roger Williams could not but recognise the interposition of the Supreme Providence which rules the Universe, and declared the con

*Judge Story's Centennial Address, Salem, 1828, p. 57.

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