Besides this, Roger Williams was an avowed democrat. He proclaimed this truth: “Kings and magistrates are invested with no more power than the people intrust to them.”[849] And he said again: “The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.”[850] Republicanism was the logical sequence of religious liberty—came from it as naturally as the bud expands into the flower. Yet it startled the Pilgrims. They were constantly making forays into the domain of absolutism. They never scrupled, when they had a chance, at clutching popular prerogatives. They were always busy in enacting democracy into law; but they were shocked when Roger Williams put it into propositions. “Had Cromwell been in power at the time, with his republican bias,” remarks Felt, “these sentiments would have been crowned with approbation; but being uttered under one of the Stuarts, they were hissed as the expression of sedition. It has ever been in accordance with the spirit of human policy, that principles under the circumstances of one period are accounted patriotism, which under the circumstances of another era are denounced as treason.”[851] Thus it was that the theories of Roger Williams “led him into perpetual collision with the clergy and the government of Massachusetts Bay. It had ever been their custom to respect the church of England, and in the mother-country, they had frequented its service; yet its principles and its administration were still harshly exclusive. The American reformer would hold no communion with intolerance; for, said he, ‘the doctrine of persecution for conscience’ sake is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.’ “The magistrates insisted on the presence of every man at public worship; Williams reprobated the law; the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling, seemed like requiring hypocrisy. ‘An unbelieving soul is dead in sin’—such was his argument. ‘And to force the indifferent from one worship to another, is like shifting a dead man into several changes of apparel.’ He added: ‘No one should be forced to worship, or to maintain a worship against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from those who hire him.’