at all. Putting his arguments into the deferential form of mere questions, he published, in 1644, what he called

Queries of Highest Consideration." The introduction to this little book is a direct address to both houses of parliament, and speaks to them with the noble Miltonic accent: "Most renowned patriots, you sit at helm in as great a storm as e'er poor England's commonwealth was lost in; yet be you pleased to remember that, excepting the affairs . . . of religion, . . . all your consultations, conclusions, executions, are not of the quantity of the value of one poor drop of water. . . It shall never be your honor, to this or future ages, to be confined to the patterns of either French, Dutch, Scotch, or New-English churches. ... If he whose name is Wonderful, Counsellor, be consulted, . . . we are confident you shall exceed the acts and patterns of all neighbor nations." Then, in the book itself, turning to the ecclesiastical champions who confronted one another in the Westminster Assembly, he puts to them twelve great questions. These questions pierce to the core of all ecclesiastical disputes then and since then. They contain the germs of all truths that go to the erection upon this carth of a majestic human commonwealth, in which all souls shall be utterly free. Observe the foresight and the glorious audacity of this seventeenth century American: "We query where you now find one footstep, print, or pattern, in this doctrine of the Son of God, for a . . . national church. . . . Again we ask, whether in the constitution of a national church it can possibly be framed without a racking and tormenting of the souls as well as of the bodies of persons. . . . It seems not possible to fit it to every conscience: sooner shall one suit of apparel fit everybody, one lawprecedent every case, or one size or last every foot. . . . Whether it be not the cause of a world of hypocrites, the soothing up of people in a formal state-worship to the ruin

1 Reprinted in Narr. Club Pub. II. 241–275.

...

of their souls, the ground of persecution to Christ Jesus in his members, and sooner or later the kindling of the devouring flames of civil wars. . . . Since you profess to want more light, and that a greater light is yet to be expected, we query how you can profess and swear to persecute all others as schismatics, heretics, and so forth, that believe they see a further light, and dare not join with either of your churches. . . . Whether . . . it be not a true mark... of a false church to persecute; it being the nature only of a wolf to hunt the lambs and sheep, but impossible for a lamb or sheep, or a thousand flocks of sheep to persecute one wolf. . . . Whether there can possibly be expected the least look of peace in these fatal distractions and tempests raised, but by taking counsel of the greatest and wisest politician that ever was, the Lord Jesus Christ."1

All this, of course, was stark and dreadful heresy; but it was heresy for which Roger Williams had already suffered loss and pain, and was prepared to suffer more. Whatever were the faults of this man, indifference to the sacred prerogatives of personality was not among them. He could not bear the weight of any fetters upon his own. soul; and the spectacle of them upon any other soul, filled him with pity and great wrath. Very likely in his early manhood he had been, both in speech and deed, hot, precipitate, destructive. But, for him, time, meditation, sorrow, solitude, the presence of nature, a larger acquaintance with mankind, had been doing their work, chastening and mellowing him; and though nothing could quench the fire of his spirit, or tame him into a safe, calculating, and conventional person, pulling judiciously in any regulation-traces, -he had certainly grown in patience, and in the justice which patience gives. Above all, however, his nature had become absolutely clear in its adjustment of certain grand ideas, of which the chief was soul-liberty. On behalf of

1 Narr. Club Pub. II. 264-274.

that idea, having now an opportunity to free his mind, he resolved to do so, keeping nothing back; and accordingly, almost upon the heels of the little book that has just been mentioned, he sent out another-not a little one; a book of strong, limpid, and passionate argument, glorious for its intuitions of the world's coming wisdom, and in its very title flinging out defiantly a challenge to all comers. He called it "The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience." 1

This book, which had two editions within its first year, and quickly attained the honor of martyrdom in the flames of a Presbyterian auto-da-fé, was written, the author tells us, while he was busy with his task of procuring fuel for the poor of London, " in change of rooms and corners, yea sometimes. . . in variety of strange houses, sometimes in the fields, in the midst of travel; where he hath been forced to gather and scatter his loose thoughts and papers." It is a treatise in the form of a dialogue, the interlocutors being two angelic and sorrowful fugitives, Truth and Peace, who, after long separations and friendless wanderings over the earth, have at last met in some dusky corner of it, where they confer together mournfully over those errors and passions which blind men, and fill the world with tumult and misery. The conversation between these heavenly personages goes forward at great length, and covers the entire field of the doctrine of intellectual freedom. In the very year in which this book was published, in London, John Milton likewise gave to the public, in the same place, his majestic plea for soul-liberty, "Arcopagitica;" but even Milton's vision of this sublime truth had not then acquired the breadth and clearness with which it was revealed to Roger Williams. Milton asks only that "many be tolerated rather than all be compelled," and immediately suggests this fatal limitation: "I mean not

1 First published, London, 1644. Reprinted in Narr. Club Pub. III

1

tolerated Popery and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate." How much nobler and more spacious is the declaration of Roger Williams! "It is the will and command of God, that . . . a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men, in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only, in soul-matters, able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's Spirit, the word of God." 2

It may be that this great work had not even passed from the hands of the printer, when the author of it, having fully accomplished the business that brought him to England, had set out upon his return to Rhode Island, where he arrived in the autumn of 1644. His book, having likewise set out upon its travels, reached in due time the library of John Cotton, and stirred him up to make a reply, which was published in London in 1647, and which bore a title reverberating that given by Roger Williams to his book: "The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb." Cotton's book quickly found Roger Williams, at his home in Rhode Island, and of course aroused him to write a rejoinder. This he sent to England for publication; but it did not get into print until his own second visit there, in 1652. Its title is a reiteration of that given to his former work, and is likewise a characteristic retort upon the modification of it made by his antagonist: "The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb." 3

As usual, this book has several prefaces. The first one, addressed "to the most honorable, the parliament of the commonwealth of England," is written with great power. It is a magnificent and soul-stirring appeal, a noble chant

1 "Areopagitica," Arber's ed. 76.

Narr. Club Pub. III.

3 Reprinted in Narr, Club Pub. IV. 1–547.

of spiritual liberty, an overture in sonorous word-music to the mighty strain that rolls stormily through the book, an invocation to the rulers of England to practise the magnanimity of a complete enfranchisement of human souls within all the realms swayed by their authority: "O ye, the prime of English men and English worthics, whose senses. have so oft perceived the everlasting arms of the invincible and eternal King, when your ship's hold hath been full with water, yea with blood, . . . when she hath beaten upon some rocky hearts and passages as if she would have staved and split into a thousand pieces. Yet this so near . . . foundered, sinking nation, hath the God of heaven, by your most valiant and careful hands, brought safe to peace, her harbor. Why, now, should any duty possible be impossible? Yea, why not impossibilities possible? Why should your English scas contend with a neighbor Dutchman, for the motion of a piece of silk, . . . and not ten thousand fold much more your English spirits with theirs, for the crown of that state-piety and wisdom which may make your faces more to shine, . . . with a glory far transcending all your fairest neighbors' copies. The States of Holland, having smarted deeply and paid so dearly for the purchase of their freedoms, reach to . . . the world a taste of such of their dainties. And yet (with due reverence to so wise a state and with due thankfulness for mercy and relief to many poor oppressed consciences) I say, their piety nor policy could ever yet reach so far, nor could they in all their school of war . . . learn that one poor lesson of setting absolutely the consciences of all men free. . . . But why should not such a parliament as England never had. . . outshoot and teach their neighbors, by framing a safe communication of freedom of conscience in worship, even to . . . the Papists and Arminians themselves? . . . The Pope, the Turk, the King of Spain, the Emperor, and the rest of persecutors, build among the cagles and the stars; yet, while they practise violence to the souls of men and make their swords of steel corrivals with the two-edged