It is timely in the hour of democracy’s triumph to turn our thoughts toward the genesis of soul-liberty in America. Today millions of men espouse her sacred cause. In the dawn of American history, in the early colonial times, a misunderstood, maligned, and persecuted refugee, Roger Williams, stood almost alone as her defender. Driven from motherland and from adopted home, he found among the savages of the wilderness a place where he could live out his principles of soul-liberty and grant freely to others what he desired for himself. He has been rightly called “The First American,” because he was the first to actualize in a commonwealth the distinctively American principle of freedom for mind and body and soul. Roger Williams was not the discoverer of the principle of soul-liberty. What Jesus did and said was the torch of truth destined to illumine the whole world. His death on the cross was the voice of God in eloquent terms, telling us that all men were equal sharers in his love and entitled to equal opportunities and privileges in the world which he had made for man’s well-being. Christ taught clearly that men should not force others to belief in him or to Christian conduct, nor destroy those who failed to follow his teachings as they saw them. For centuries faithful witnesses kept alive in the world these precious truths. In fact, for a millennium the name Anabaptist or Baptist was synonymous with soul-liberty. Baptists on the Continent and in England sowed broadcast these seeds which led to a glorious harvest in the new world. After the death of Roger Williams the Baptists in the colonies continued the work so nobly begun by him. In the face of bitterest persecution they labored for a century before the much-desired principle of soul-liberty was interwoven into our National Constitution and protected by the First Amendment. Our Western Hemisphere represents two types of civilization. The Rio Grande is the dividing line between a civilization which is Baptist in its distinctive and essential character and one which is non-Baptist. To the north we see what the democracy of the soul can do when associated with the democracy of political rights. To the south we see but the twilight of civilization, a place where there is political democracy in name, but where it is rendered powerless because the mind and soul do not enjoy full freedom. It is the difference between religious democracy and religious autocracy. To the north the Bible is loved, it is studied freely, and its principles are followed. It is a land where the Bible is unchained and where the prevailing religions are of a church without a bishop in a land without a king. To the south the Bible is practically suppressed, its study is discouraged, and its truths go unheeded.