Chapter XII

       Rhode Island and New Hampshire

       Table of Contents

      Charles I. and Archbishop Laud made life so bitter to the Puritans of England, that many thousands crossed the ocean and settled in New England. The king and archbishop were determined that everybody should accept the Prayer-book. They sent a minister to Edinburgh to force it upon the people of Scotland. When he undertook to read prayers in the cathedral, Jennie Geddis let fly a three-legged stool at his head. “What! ye villain! Will you say mass here!” she shouted.

      “Stone him! stone him!” cried the people, and the minister had to run for his life.

      In a short time all Scotland was in an uproar, and a little later all England, and John Hampden, John Pym, and Oliver Cromwell had a hand in public affairs. Between 1629 and 1639 more than twenty thousand Puritans left England, and settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

      “We must have a school, that our children may not grow up in ignorance,” said the people around Boston. The general court voted to establish one, which was opened in Cambridge, 1638 — the first in America. John Harvard, the minister of Charlestown, seeing the needs of the people, and taking a long look ahead, gave half of his property — about eight hundred pounds — and his library to the school; and the people, reverencing his memory, named it Harvard College.

      Joseph Glover started from England with a printing-press and type, but died before reaching America, and Stephen Daye took charge of the press. The oath which men took when they became voters was the first printing in America. The first pamphlet was an Almanac for 1639. The next year, 1640, John Eliot and Thomas Welde translated the Psalms in metre, and Thomas Daye printed them, making a volume of three hundred pages — the first book printed in America north of Mexico.

      Among the people who arrived in Massachusetts was a young minister, Roger Williams, and his wife. He had been educated at Cambridge. He was exceedingly conscientious, and so staunch a Puritan that the officers of Archbishop Laud compelled him to flee from England. He went to Plymouth, preached awhile, and visited the Narragansett Indians. He was kind-hearted, and they welcomed him as a friend. From the wigwams of the Indians he went to Salem to preach. He had an intense hatred of the Pope and all the superstitions of the Church of Rome; and he so stirred up John Endicott, who was captain of the militia, that one day, when the soldiers were drilling, Endicott run his sword through the flag and cut out the cross, because it was an emblem of superstition.

      Mr. Williams maintained that the settlers had no right to occupy their lands. “King James,” he said, “never owned the land in America. He never purchased it; never paid the Indians anything for it. Though he had given it to the colonists, he had no right to do so; and the colonists had no title.”

      This was calling in question not only their title to land, but everything else. Such an opinion sounded very much like treason. He was called to account by the governor, and promised to burn a pamphlet which he had written, thus making amends.

      During Queen Elizabeth’s reign a law had been passed that compelled everybody to attend church. James I. re-enacted the law. The men of Scrooby who would not obey it had been driven out of England to Holland, and from thence to Plymouth. The Puritans of England were just as strenuous as the king and the archbishop that everybody must go to meeting on Sunday. The Puritans who settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut re-enacted the law, but Mr. Williams disputed their right to do so.

      “It is contrary to the liberty of conscience,” he said. “Under it no man can be truly free. No man should be forced to attend worship or maintain worship against his own free consent.”

      He was right; and Elizabeth, James, and his fellow-Puritans were wrong. Through all past ages everybody had been wrong.

      “Is not the laborer worthy of his hire?” asked the magistrates.

      “Yes, from those who hire him,” said Mr. Williams.

      The justices of peace and the officers of government were selected from the members of the church.

      “Do you employ a doctor because he is a member of the church, or because he is a good physician? Do you trust your ship to the pilot because he is a member of the church, or because he knows where the rocks are, and how to avoid them?”

      “It is the duty of the officers to guard the people from error and heresy,” said his opponents.

      “The officers are the people’s agents. Conscience belongs to the individual: it is not public property. The civil officer has nothing to do with conscience,” Mr. Williams replied.

      Never before had such an idea been advanced. The Puritans loved liberty, and their ideas of what constituted liberty were far in advance of those held by the bishop and nobility of England; but Mr. Williams could see what his fellow-Puritans could not discern — that neither the governor nor the justice of the peace had anything to do with the religious beliefs of men. Mr. Williams had promulgated a great truth which they could not understand; but he was not always right in his thinking or wise in his actions. The governor under the charter had authority to require every settler to take the oath of allegiance. Mr. Williams disputed that right, and said it was also a violation of the liberty of conscience.

      Instead of continuing to preach to the people of Salem, he sent them a letter informing them that he would not preach in the meeting-house any more, nor should he have anything to do with the churches; for they were defiled by hypocrisy and worldliness. and they were false worshippers. The ministers were false teachers, and their doctrine corrupt. Unless the Salem people were ready to leave their church and follow him, he should preach to them no longer. He preached in his own house, but not in the meeting-house.

      What should the governor, the magistrates, and his fellow-ministers do? Mr. Williams was defying authority, and stirring up trouble. If permitted to go on. The community would be divided into factions. If authority were overthrown, there would be anarchy. He was a good man, conscientious, self-denying, tenacious of his views, thinking that he was right and everybody else wrong. The ministers, the governor, and his assistants were equally conscientious. For the peace and harmony of the colony, it would be best to send him to England, as they had a right to do under the charter; but while they were deliberating Mr. Williams disappeared from Salem.

      It was midwinter; but rather than be sent back to England he went out into the wilderness, wandering through deep snows, sleeping at night in hollow trees, finding shelter and food in the wigwams of the Indians.

      Governor Bradford at Plymouth learned that he was with the Indians, and sent him a kind letter. Five friends joined him. He began to build a house at Seekonk; but Governor Bradford informed him that the location which he had chosen was within the boundary of Massachusetts, and advised him to go beyond it Mr. Williams thought it wise to do so. He and his friends paddled their canoes down the Pawtucket River to the country of the Narragansetts.

      “Welcome! welcome!” said his old friends, the Indians. He landed upon a lovely spot, where a spring of pure water bubbled from the ground.

      “Here we will make our home,” said Mr. Williams, naming the place Providence, in acknowledgment of God’s providential care.

      Canonicus, chief of the Narragansetts, gave Mr. Williams a tract of land; but he was so large-hearted that he gave farms to all who wanted to build a home.

      “I desire that it may be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience,” he said.

      People who had suffered persecution in England, and who did not like the rule of the Puritans in Massachusetts,