These wholly refused to hear the church, denying it, and all the churches in the Bay, to be true churches, and (except two) are all rebaptized. After some time Roger Williams left the Baptist church he had organized in Providence. Because of this fact many have asked the question, “Was Roger Williams after all a Baptist?” His life-story reveals the fact that he held the Baptist views before he left Plymouth. Elder Brewster detected the Baptist heresy in his teaching to the people of the Pilgrim colony and warned the leaders of the Bay Colony of this tendency to “Anabaptistery.” Williams’ ministry in the Bay Colony reveals the fact that he was against everything which was related to the Episcopacy or that might even lead to a “presbytery.” He refused to minister to the Boston church because it was related to the Episcopal State Church of England. He also questioned the propriety of the ministers’ conference in New England, for fear they might establish a presbytery which would rob the local church of its congregational privileges. His whole life in America was universally true to the accepted Baptist position relative to church polity. At the time of Williams’ baptism, English Baptists were agitated in regard to the proper administrators of Christian baptism. Many crossed to the Continent and were baptized by ministers in Holland. Williams was soon troubled also in regard to the same question. Was he properly baptized? That was the question which confronted him. He would not juggle with his conscience. He knew of no Baptist minister or baptized believer ordained to the ministry in America when he was baptized. His own baptism was by an unbaptized person. He made diligent study of the question and could not satisfy his mind that there was a real succession of proper administrators. In the awful decline of the church he was convinced that the sacred succession had been broken. He believed that either that succession must be in existence, or God must raise up a new “apostolate,” to commence again the sacred succession. True to principle, he felt he must withdraw from the church at Providence. In the years which followed nothing which he said or did ever changed the facts that he was the first recognized pastor of the first Baptist church that was organized in America, that he was the first known case in America of a believer being immersed upon profession of faith into the fellowship of a local Baptist church, and that he was the organizer of the first Baptist church in America.