Part 30 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Williams dealt with ecclesiastically.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governors.h.i.+p by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold ”teacher”

of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an ”elder,” and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, ent.i.tled as such to be proceeded with ”in a church way” first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's ”violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle.” The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they ”were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them.” But the ”elders” now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.

[Sidenote: The governor's verse.]

It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly against the Salem heretic was thus foiled by Cotton's prudent and intricate orderliness in procedure that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is happily the only example of his verse that has survived:

[Sidenote: Eliot's New England Biography, 156, 157.]

Let men of G.o.d in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a c.o.c.katrice To poison all with heresy and vice.

If men be left and otherwise combine, My epitaph's I die no libertine.

XII.

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

The most substantial grievance of the rulers against Williams was his opposition to ”the oath.” In order to make sure of the loyalty of the residents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity to be taken by residents had been promulgated. Practical men are wont to put aside minor scruples in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew-bread when he is famis.h.i.+ng: but Williams would rather starve than mumble a crumb of it. He did not believe in enforced oaths; they obliged the wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded the soul's freedom.

Cotton says that Williams's scruples excited such an opposition to the oath that the magistrates were not able to enforce it. He thus unwittingly throws a strong light on the weakness of the age, and extenuates the conduct of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The age was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this side was the product of his time. In such an age a scruple-maker of ability and originality like Williams might be a source of danger.

[Sidenote: Scruples small and great.]

During the year following Williams was several times ”convented”

before the Court. He was charged with having broken his promise not to speak about the patent, with opposing the residents' oath, with maintaining certain scruples in opposition to the customs of the times, as that a man should not return thanks after a meal, or call on an unregenerate child to give thanks for his food. These were not more trivial certainly than half a hundred scruples then prevalent, but they chanced to be unfas.h.i.+onable--a d.a.m.ning fault in a scruple.

The sense of proportion was feeble in religionists of that day, and neither Williams nor his opponents understood the comparative magnitude of his greater contentions, and the triviality of those petty scruples about which, like the whole Puritan world, he was very busy. Religious freedom and the obligation of grace after meat could then be put into the same category. As years went by, although the mind of Williams was never disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to see clearly what was the real battle of his life. No better fortune can befall a great spirit than such a clarification of vision. The extended works of Williams's later life are written mainly to overthrow the ”b.l.o.o.d.y tenent of persecution.” It was this champions.h.i.+p of soul liberty as the weightiest matter of the law that lifted him above all others who paid t.i.thes of their little garden herbs.

[Sidenote: Williams inflexible.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 81.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Rec., i, 135, 136.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Rec., i, 156, 157. Winthrop's Journal, i, 194.]

Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard Brown, the ruling elder of the church at Watertown, seems to have submitted to the remonstrance of the magistrates against his too charitable judgment of the Roman churches. Eliot, of Roxbury, afterward the Indian apostle, advanced peculiar opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced.

Stoughton, who had denied that the ”a.s.sistants” of a corporation were scriptural magistrates, was brought to book about this time, and he retracted. Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at last.

The town had been refused its land on Marble Neck because of its ordination of Williams, and having, under Williams's leaders.h.i.+p, protested in a letter to the churches against the injustice of spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the deputies of Salem were now summarily turned out of the court. Endecott, with characteristic violence, protested further against the double injustice to Salem. He was promptly put under arrest, and this severity brought swift conviction to his mind, so that he humbly apologized and submitted the same day. The only bond of unity between the rash Salem leader and Williams was a common tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the heroic, long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he called the ”rockie strength” of his opinions in spite of penalties and majorities, was far removed from a leader who bent before the first blast, and who became in later life the harshest persecutor in the commonwealth.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Williams's trial.]

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, incorrigible offender.