Table Of ContentRoger Williams
The Church and the State
BOOKS BY EDMUND S. MORGAN
The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations
in Seventeenth-Century New England
Virginians at Home: Family Life
in the Eighteenth Century
The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution
(with Helen M. Morgan)
The Birth of the Republic
The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Minthrop
The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles
Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea
Roger Williams: The Church and the State
So What about History?
American Slavery—American Freedom:
The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
The Genius of George Washington
The Challenge of the American Revolution
The Meaning of Independence: John Adams,
George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson
EDITED WORKS
Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents
on the Stamp Act Crisis
The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth: The Conscience
of a Puritan
Puritan Political Ideas
The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians
and the Sources
The American Revolution: Two Centuries
of Interpretation
Roger Williams
The Qhurch and the State
Edmund S. Morgan
W • W • Norton & Company • New York • London
Copyright © 1967 by EdmundS. Morgan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-25999
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 1987 by arrangement with
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2801
John Street, Markham, Ontario L3R 1B4
ISBN0-353-30M03-5
W. W. Norton 8c Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 37 Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3NU
123456789 10
Foreword
This is a book I had not intended to write. When the com
plete publications of Roger Williams were reissued a few
years ago, I took the opportunity to read them consecutively
and systematically. As I read and reread, I gradually recog
nized that I had formerly misunderstood and misjudged the
man, and I thought that many other historians had done so
too. His single-minded zeal in support of every cause he
espoused has drawn attention away from the structure of his
thought. Although Williams usually wrote polemically, in
the heat of the contests of his day, his ideas exhibit an
intricate and beautiful symmetry, broken only on the rare
occasions when he succumbed to the temptation to argue
from a position that he had himself rejected but knew that
his opponents accepted. I have tried to reconstruct the
course of his thought and to expose the symmetry of the
ideas that lay behind the polemics. My wife, as always, has
helped me more than I can say. If we have succeeded, the
book belongs to Roger Williams.
E. S. M.
Contents
Foreword v
I. Englishman, Puritan, Separatist 3
The Importance of Being English 6
Puritanism 11
Separatism 18
II. The Church and Its Ministry 28
The Equality of Worship 29
Full Repentance and Full Separation 33
Apostles and Pastors 40
The Extinction of the Church 45
Prophets in Sackcloth 50
The Offense of Quakerism 56
III. Church and State in Massachusetts 62
The Divine Right of Kings 64
The Massachusetts Way 68
The New Israel 79
IV. The Basis of Government 86
A Covenant Without God 87
The Elect Nation 99
The Wrath of God 103
The Meaning of Adversity 107
V. The Business of Government 115
The Art of Governing 113
Peace on Earth 120
Barbarism and Civility 126
Coercion of Conscience 130
Liberty of Conscience 135
Notes
T45
Index
Roger Williams
The Church and the State
Englishman, '’Puritan, Separatist
jt^L^oGER Williams lived in what he called “wonderful,
searching, disputing and dissenting times/’1 Three centuries
later the description still seems accurate. From the accession
of James Stuart in 1603 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688
Englishmen thought long and hard about authority, both
in church and in state, and they tried their thoughts in ac
tion. None thought longer or harder, none searched, dis
puted, or dissented more earnestly than Williams himself,
and none was more ready to try his thoughts in action.
The facts of his life, so far as they are known, have been
often and ably related: his education at Charterhouse and
Cambridge, his exodus to Massachusetts in the first winter
of the Puritan settlement there, his expulsion from the
colony for his novel ideas, his founding of Rhode Island as
a refuge for religious dissent, and his subsequent career as
leader and defender of the colony and spokesman for free
dom of conscience in both England and America. The his-
1 The Notes are on pages 145-161.
3
j
ROGER WILLIAMS: THE CHURCH AND THE STATE
tory is an honorable one and has earned a place in the
classic accounts of the American past. It will not be repeated
here, for this is neither a biography of Williams nor a study
of his colony, but an attempt to trace the way he thought.2
Williams did what he did because of what he thought.
Never was a man of action more an intellectual. But in the
progression of his ideas we can find much more than an
explanation of what he did. We can find a man thinking in
an age of great intellectual expansion—not an ordinary man,
for ordinary men seldom think, not a typical man, for in
the end hardly anyone agreed with him, but a man never
theless who was driven by the same intellectual forces that
moved other men of that restless time. Williams was a
Puritan, and in him we can watch Puritan thought explod
ing, hurling itself outward to its ultimate limits. The di
verse internal energies that other Puritans were able to re
strain and bring into uneasy harmony went unchecked in
Williams. If we follow him as he allowed the force of his
ideas to sweep him from the conventional to the original,
from orthodoxy to heresy, we will enjoy the spectacle of a
great religious imagination at work, and at the same time
we will see exposed some of the hidden conflicts that tor
mented every Puritan.
The spectacle is not easily observed. Roger Williams’
writings are voluminous, filling seven volumes in the latest
edition,8 but they are couched in a syntax that often defies
analysis: Williams could stretch a sentence to several para
graphs before bringing himself to a predicate. What is
worse, for anyone interested in the way he got from one
idea to another, his surviving writings, other than a few
letters, were all written after his thought had reached ma
turity. The earliest was published in 1643, seven years after
his banishment from Massachusetts. Nearly everything we
know about what Williams thought before he left Massa
