Chapter The New England Clergy of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

attractive figures. This was Roger Williams, an independent among the independents. Born in Wales, a university man and a clergyman in the Church of England, he had turned nonconformist, and appeared in Plymouth colony in the usual way. In 1633, two years after his arrival at Plymouth, Williams went to Salem to be the minister there; but his teachings were altogether too radical to suit his stern and narrow- minded Puritan brethren. He preached a real liberty of thought and worship -- even for Baptists and Quakers; taught that it was unrighteous to rob the Indian of his land, and to treat captives with cruelty; and maintained that the State's authority did not extend over the individual conscience or opinion. Roger Williams was one of those who proclaim the truth so far in advance of the conceptions held by those about them, that they seem to be living years before their proper time. He was banished from Massachusetts in 1636; and making friends with the Pequot Indians, he planted on Narragansett Bay the settlement of Providence. Williams revisited England several times, and was no inconspicuous figure there. He knew Milton and had the friendship of Cromwell. It was on one of these visits that he wrote his first important treatise on "Soul Liberty," -- The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. This was published at London in 1644, the year in which Milton's Areopagitica, a plea for the freedom of the press, appeared. Williams's Bloody Tenet was the beginning of a famous literary battle between himself and that belligerent Puritan defender, John Cotton, who in 1647 published his reply in The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb. The final rejoinder came from Roger Williams in The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. And with this brief summary of the encounter between these two keen-minded, argument-loving minds, their blows delivered in what Williams called "sharp Scripture language," we may well afford to take our leave of Puritan controversy.

John Eliot, 1604-90.

The attitude of the Englishman toward the native inhabitants of America¹ has long been marked with injustice and dishonor. The precarious situation of the colonists surrounded by fierce and savage tribes naturally produced occasion for the display of savage passions on the part of the white man as well as on that of the Indian. The horrors of war and massacre that redden the early annals of colonial history were, no doubt, due in part to the indiscretions and encroachments of the superior race. Some one has said of the Puritan pioneers that "first they fell upon their knees, and then they fell on the aborigines." As we have seen, Roger Williams declared boldly for a different policy; and his own methods with the savage peoples were well illustrated in the comparative peace and prosperity of his settlement in Rhode Island. Another peacemaker is discovered in the gentle personality of John Eliot, the "Apostle to the Indians," who came to Boston in 1631, and devoted his life to the conversion of these children of the forest, whom he regarded as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. He studied their native tongue, preached to them, converted many, and organized his converts in little churches of their own. He wrote several books of minor importance; but he is to be remembered as a translator of the entire Bible into the Algonquin tongue. It was a tremendous task and a remarkable achievement. He published the New Testament in 1661 and the Old Testament in 1663. It was the first Bible in any language, printed in British America. This translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular of a people who had no written language, done largely by candle-light after days devoted to exacting work in his Roxbury parish, is a most remarkable monument to "Apostle" Eliot's laborious industry and his missionary zeal.

The Mathers: a distinguished Family.

The scholarly attainments of colonial Puritanism have been amply shown by this record of the New England ministry in the literature of the time. The history of a single family furnishes our most conspicuous and most curiously interesting illustration of scholastic eminence and its position in popular regard. Through three generations the Mathers -- in grandfather, son, and grandson -- appear as brilliant intellectual leaders of the Massachusetts clergy.