ROGER WILLIAMS [Illustration: Statue of Roger Williams in Roger Williams Park, Providence, R. I.] ROGER WILLIAMS PROPHET AND PIONEER OF SOUL-LIBERTY _By_ ARTHUR B. STRICKLAND [Illustration] THE JUDSON PRESS BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS NEW YORK LOS ANGELES KANSAS CITY SEATTLE TORONTO Copyright, 1919, by GILBERT N. BRINK, SECRETARY Published June, 1919 TO My Wife SYMPATHETIC HELPER AND INSPIRING COMPANION IN ALL MY WORK THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED BAPTIST SPARKS FROM A HEBREW ANVIL “Even the absence of a definite experiment must not deter him. He would create a society where the principles would be put to the test. He would fashion a State where the Church and the crown would be mutually helpful though independent. He would create a condition of humanity where the sovereignty of the soul before God would be respected, and where every man, believer or disbeliever, Gentile, Jew, or Turk, would have untrammeled opportunity for the display and exercise of the faith within him. Here lies the core of his heroism!” CONCERNING THE MONUMENT AT ROGER WILLIAMS PARK “This one monument speaks the gratitude of one State. But the whole country has an eloquent voice of appreciation. Even as the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren, the builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intones the larger praise when it says, ‘If you would see his monument, look around you,’ so would we point to the great principles of equal and religious freedom, written into the Constitution of forty-eight States, and engraven on the minds of ninety millions of people in our country and making their moral and civic influence felt all over the civilized globe, as worthy tributes to the genius of Roger Williams.” --_Extracts from Thanksgiving Address on “Roger Williams,” delivered by Rabbi Abram Simon, Ph. D., to Reformed Congregation Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, November 24, 1912._ PREFACE The four years of the great war have witnessed two astounding facts, namely, the recrudescence of an ancient barbarism and the world-wide application of the ideals of Christianity. During these momentous times the frontiers of barbarism and of civilization were clearly marked. The greater part of the world declared its position and took sides with one or other of the contestants. The whole world was either for or against, either friend or foe to, the essential principles of a Christian civilization.