Page:What cheer, or, Roger Williams in banishment (1896).pdf/223

 Secondly; It driveth away wolves from worrying and scattering the sheep of Christ; (for false teachers be wolves.)

Thirdly; Such executions upon such evil doers causeth all the country to hear and fear, and do no more such wickedness.

Fourthly; The punishments, executed upon false prophets and seducing teachers, do bring down showers of God's blessings upon the civil state.

Fifthly; It is an honor to God's justice that such judgments are executed."

He says, "If there be stones in the streets the magistrate need not fetch a sword from the smith's shop, nor a halter from the roper's, to punish a heretic."

It will appear that time has made no improvement upon the leading principles of Williams, as gathered from different parts of his replies to Cotton. He says that "the people are the origin of all free power in government." "That the people are not invested by Christ Jesus with power to rule his Church." That they can give no such power to the magistrate. "That the kingdom of Christ is spiritual"—that to introduce the civil sword into this spiritual kingdom is "to confound Heaven and earth together, and lay all upon heaps of confusion"—"Is to take Christ and make him king by force (John vi, 15)—to make his kingdom of this world—to set up a civil and temporal Israel—to bound out new earthy lands of Canaan; yea, and to set up a Spanish inquisition, in all parts of the world, to the speedy destruction of millions of souls," &c.

Cotton says, "that when the kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of the Lord, it is not by making Christ a temporal king; but by making the temporal kingdoms nursing fathers to the Church"—"that religion was not to be propagated by the sword; but protected and preserved by it."

Williams replies, "that the husbandman weeds his garden to increase his grain, and that consequently it is the object of the hand that destroys the heretic to make the Christian"—"That the sword may make a nation of hypocrites, but not of Christians," &c.

I have thrown together these few detached sentences, that the reader, who may have little inclination to peruse a controversy on a question which happily has no place in the present age,