Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/452

 breach of the first table [of the decalogue] otherwise than in such cases as did disturb the civil peace; secondly, that he ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerated man.’ The Salem congregation at first stood by their ‘teacher,’ but fear of ostracism and disfranchisement coerced them into submission, and on 9 Oct. 1635 Roger Williams, still persisting in his ‘contumacy,’ was, according to the euphemism of John Cotton, the apologist of the authorities at Boston, ordered to be enlarged out of Massachusetts (see North American Review, April 1868; cf., Antapologia, 1644, p. 165; , Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time, 1645, p. 126; , Baptists in New England, ap. American Bapt. Publ. Soc. Trans. 1894, 18 sq.) He was ordered to depart out of Massachusetts' jurisdiction within six weeks, but was afterwards granted leave to remain in Salem until the next spring, provided he should not ‘go about to draw others to his opinions.’ The Boston council even went further and offered to revoke the sentence of banishment upon the sole condition that he should not disseminate ‘any of his different opinions in matters of religion;’ but as many still resorted to his house to hear him he was held to have violated this condition. In January he was cited to Boston, but declined to go, and Captain John Underhill (d. 1672) [q. v.] was despatched to Salem with a sloop under orders to arrest him and put him aboard ship for England.

In the meantime Williams had received a hint from Winthrop ‘to arise and flee into the Narrohiganset's country, free from English Pattents.’ With four or five companions Williams ‘steered his course’ for the land of the Narragansett Indians, being ‘sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.’ Of the Indian chief Ousamequin he purchased a tract of land at Manton's Neck, on the east bank of the Seekonk river, and in April 1636 commenced to plant. But his old friend the governor of Plymouth ‘lovingly advised’ him that ‘he had fallen into the edge of their bounds.’ At the end of May, therefore, he crossed over the water with his companions and began a settlement at a spot on the banks of the ‘Mooshausic,’ to which he gave the name Providence. There, later on in 1636, he was joined by his wife and two children. The settlers agreed to submit themselves to the will of the majority ‘only in civil things.’ By a deed dated 24 March 1638, two sachems of Narragansett Bay, with whom he had struck up a friendship while living at Plymouth, made over to him the lands contiguous to the settlement (, Hist. of Rhode Island, i. 40;, p. 64; , Short Hist. of Rhode Island, 1877; Proceedings of Massachusetts Hist. Soc. 1873, p. 356).

Williams's tendency to the views of the anabaptists had already been pronounced, and in 1639, having been publicly immersed, he planted the first baptist church in Providence, ‘the mother of eighteen thousand churches of a like faith and order on the continent of America’ (, Hist. of Baptists, i. 473;, i. 91). A few months later he characteristically disputed the validity of immersion, severed his connection with the baptists forthwith, and became ‘a seeker’ (that is, one dissatisfied with all existing sects). It is certainly not a little remarkable that Williams, while carrying to their logical issues the principles of such harbingers of individualism in religion as Robert Browne [q. v.], Henry Jacob [q. v.], and John Smith (d. 1612) [q. v.], the se-baptist, should also, in his remote settlement, have attained conclusions so closely allied to those expressed a few years later by Chillingworth, by Jeremy Taylor in his ‘Liberty of Prophesying,’ but more particularly by Milton.

In the meantime additions were being made, chiefly by refugees from Massachusetts, to Williams's little settlement at Providence. In other parts of Narragansett Bay, moreover, settlers appeared, and with the development of the ‘synoikismos’ Williams's peculiar views of ‘soul liberty’ and wide religious toleration acquired strength and precision. In 1639 a number of ‘antinomians’ from Massachusetts, inspired in large measure by the counsels of Sir Henry Vane the younger [q. v.], settled in the township of Newport. Vane, during his sojourn in New England, was in close correspondence with Williams. The little settlements were united by fear of encroachments on the part of Massachusetts Bay, and their uneasiness was enhanced by the consciousness that they had no other title to their land than that obtained from natives. This sense of common danger determined them to send Williams to England as the champion of their separate rights. He set sail accordingly from New York in June 1643. His leisure on the voyage he employed in compiling his very remarkable ‘Key into the Language of America; or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England’ … London, printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643, dedicated ‘to my Deare and Welbeloved Friends and Countreymen in old and new England’ (reprinted in Rhode Island Hist. Soc. Coll. vol. i. 1827). The vocabularist states that God was pleased to give him a ‘painful, patient spirit’ to lodge with the