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The Pilgrim Fathers, Part 2
Keep Advancing with the Light
When first constrained to separate from the English Church, the
Puritans had joined themselves together by a solemn covenant, as the Lord’s
free people, “to walk together in all His ways made known or to be made known
to them.”—J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers, page 74. Here was the true
spirit of reform, the vital principle of Protestantism. It was with this
purpose that the Pilgrims departed from Holland to find a home in the New
World. John Robinson, their pastor, who was providentially prevented from
accompanying them, in his farewell address to the exiles said:
“Brethren, we are now erelong to part asunder, and the Lord
knoweth whether I shall live ever to see your faces more. But whether the Lord
hath appointed it or not, I charge you before God and His blessed angels to
follow me no farther than I have followed Christ. If God should reveal anything
to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you
were to receive any truth of my ministry; for I am very confident the Lord hath
more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy word.”—Martyn, vol. 5,
p. 70.
“For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the
reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present
no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The Lutherans cannot be
drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; . . . and the Calvinists, you see, stick
fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things.
This is a misery much to be lamented; for though they were burning and shining
lights in their time, yet they penetrated not into the whole counsel of God,
but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace further light as that
which they first received.”—D. Neal, History of the Puritans, vol. 1, p.
269.
“Remember your church covenant, in which you have agreed to walk
in all the ways of the Lord, made or to be made known unto you. Remember your
promise and covenant with God and with one another, to receive whatever light
and truth shall be made known to you from His written word; but withal, take
heed, I beseech you, what you receive for truth, and compare it and weigh it
with other scriptures of truth before you accept it; for it is not possible the
Christian world should come so lately out of such thick antichristian darkness,
and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.”—Martyn, vol.
5, pp. 70, 71.
Religious Liberty Not Yet Understood
It was the desire for liberty of conscience that inspired the
Pilgrims to brave the perils of the long journey across the sea, to endure the
hardships and dangers of the wilderness, and with God’s blessing to lay, on the
shores of America, the foundation of a mighty nation. Yet honest and
God-fearing as they were, the Pilgrims did not yet comprehend the great
principle of religious liberty. The freedom which they sacrificed so much to
secure for themselves, they were not equally ready to grant to others. “Very
few, even of the foremost thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century,
had any just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the New
Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole judge of human faith.”—Ibid.,
vol. 5, p. 297. The doctrine that God has committed to the church the right to
control the conscience, and to define and punish heresy, is one of the most
deeply rooted of papal errors. While the Reformers rejected the creed of Rome,
they were not entirely free from her spirit of intolerance. The dense darkness
in which, through the long ages of her rule, popery had enveloped all
Christendom, had not even yet been wholly dissipated. Said one of the leading
ministers in the colony of Massachusetts Bay: “It was toleration that made the
world antichristian; and the church never took harm by the punishment of
heretics.”—Ibid., vol. 5, p. 335. The regulation was adopted by the
colonists that only church members should have a voice in the civil government.
A kind of state church was formed, all the people being required to contribute
to the support of the clergy, and the magistrates being authorized to suppress
heresy. Thus the secular power was in the hands of the church. It was not long
before these measures led to the inevitable result—persecution.
Roger Williams
Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger
Williams came to the New World. Like the early Pilgrims he came to enjoy
religious freedom; but, unlike them, he saw—what so few in his time had yet
seen—that this freedom was the inalienable right of all, whatever might be
their creed. He was an earnest seeker for truth, with Robinson holding it
impossible that all the light from God’s word had yet been received. Williams
“was the first person in modern Christendom to establish civil government on
the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before
the law.”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 16. He declared it to be
the duty of the magistrate to restrain crime, but never to control the
conscience. “The public or the magistrates may decide,” he said, “what is due
from man to man; but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they
are out of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear that if the
magistrates has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs today
and another tomorrow; as has been done in England by different kings and
queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman Church; so that belief
would become a heap of confusion.”—Martyn, vol. 5, p. 340.
Attendance at the services of the established church was
required under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “Williams reprobated the law;
the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance
upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed,
he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public
worship the irreligious and the unwilling, seemed only like requiring
hypocrisy. . . . ‘No one should be bound to worship, or,’ he added, ‘to
maintain a worship, against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists,
amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied
he, ‘from them that hire him.’ ”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 2.
Roger Williams was respected and beloved as a faithful minister,
a man of rare gifts, of unbending integrity and true benevolence; yet his
steadfast denial of the right of civil magistrates to authority over the
church, and his demand for religious liberty, could not be tolerated. The
application of this new doctrine, it was urged, would “subvert the fundamental
state and government of the country.”—Ibid., pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 10. He
was sentenced to banishment from the colonies, and, finally, to avoid arrest,
he was forced to flee, amid the cold and storms of winter, into the unbroken
forest.
“For fourteen weeks,” he says, “I was sorely tossed in a bitter
season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” But “the ravens fed me in the
wilderness,” and a hollow tree often served him for a shelter.—Martyn, vol. 5,
pp. 349, 350. Thus he continued his painful flight through the snow and the
trackless forest, until he found refuge with an Indian tribe whose confidence
and affection he had won while endeavoring to teach them the truths of the
gospel.
Making his way at last, after months of change and wandering, to
the shores of Narragansett Bay, he there laid the foundation of the first state
of modern times that in the fullest sense recognized the right of religious
freedom. The fundamental principle of Roger Williams’s colony was “that every
man should have liberty to worship God according to the light of his own
conscience.”—Ibid., vol. 5, p. 354. His little state, Rhode Island,
became the asylum of the oppressed, and it increased and prospered until its
foundation principles—civil and religious liberty—became the cornerstones of
the American Republic.
The Great Controversy, pp. 291-295
Next part: The Pilgrim Fathers, Part 3:
Liberty of Conscience Established
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