_Mat. 22:21_—“_Render therefore unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s_”; _Acts 5:29_—“_We must obey God rather than men._” As each believer has personal dealings with Christ and for even the pastor to come between him and his Lord is treachery to Christ and harmful to his soul, so much more does the New Testament condemn any attempt to bring the church into subjection to any other church or combination of churches, or to make the church the creature of the state. Absolute liberty of conscience under Christ has always been a distinguishing tenet of Baptists, as it is of the New Testament (_cf._ _Rom. 14:4_—“_Who art thou that judgest the servant of another? to his own lord he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be made to stand; for the Lord hath power to make him stand_”). John Locke, 100 years before American independence: “The Baptists were the first and only propounders of absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty.” George Bancroft says of Roger Williams: “He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert the doctrine of liberty of conscience in religion.... Freedom of conscience was from the first a trophy of the Baptists.... Their history is written in blood.” On Roger Williams, see John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England: “Such views are to‐day quite generally adopted by the more civilized portions of the Protestant world; but it is needless to say that they were not the views of the sixteenth century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere.” Cotton Mather said that Roger Williams “carried a windmill in his head,” and even John Quincy Adams called him “conscientiously contentious.” Cotton Mather’s windmill was one that he remembered or had heard of in Holland. It had run so fast in a gale as to set itself and a whole town on fire. Leonard Bacon, Genesis of the New England Churches, vii, says of Baptist churches: “It has been claimed for these churches that from the age of the Reformation onward they have been always foremost and always consistent in maintaining the doctrine of religious liberty. Let me not be understood as calling in question their right to so great an honor.”